The million dollar family.

In a piece she recently published on Y!CN, my friend, Nancy, posed the question 'Do you know any millionaires?'. The piece poses other questions as well. Like, 'would you pay $900 for a parking spot', and 'what would you do with a million dollars'?

Unfortunately, a million dollars doesn't go very far these days. For my family it's barely the financial reset button. Truth be told, it isn't even that. My husband and I are old fashioned enough to believe that parents should pay for things like college, weddings, and down payments on their kids' first homes. We should help them buy their first car, teach them how to drive it, and take care of it. With the economy the way it is, however, all we can afford to do is teach them to drive. Everything else they will have to do on their own, and that kills us.

We also believe that children should take care of their parents when they get older. When grandparents get to the point of not being able to do everything for themselves anymore Mom and Dad (the middle generation) should step in so that Grandma and Grandpa can still enjoy life without having to go without. If Grandpa can't lift, Dad should do the lifting. If Grandma can't stand at the stove long enough to cook, Mom should do the cooking. If they can't drive, Mom and Dad should do the driving. Back when Grandma and Grandpa where merely Mom and Dad they took care of us, day in and day out. We believe that they have the right to expect us to return the favor.

So, what does a million dollars buy? For my family, which has 6 kids, two parents, four grandparents, and one great-grandparent, it barely buys anything. It buys small controlled trusts for the kids to help them go to college, buy a modest but reliable vehicle, and maybe, maybe a down payment on a house. What's left over buys the land on which to build a multi-generational home, with maybe enough left over to actually build the home, if no frills are included in it's construction. There Mom and Dad can take care of Grandma and Grandpa without having to worry that the family elders would end up homeless or having to stretch financially just to survive.

We would still have debt. We would still have bills to pay. My husband and I would still have to work. The kids would still have to worry about their futures and how they were going to pay for things like weddings, mortgages, etc. But we would all at least having a fighting chance. There would be no $900 parking spaces. There would be no fancy restaurants, or shopping sprees. There would just be room to breathe for a week, maybe two, before the cost of living started to mount again.