'Bail 'Em Out' Parents

I sat on the phone with a friend; it’s 10 AM and we’re Face-timing with each other over our morning cups of coffee. She’s a hard-working, medical professional, currently living in a trend-setting major Canadian city, and I, a self-employed musician living in a seventy-five-year-old country home, in arguably one of the most rural parts of the East Coast of Canada. For just how starkly different our careers (and we) are from one another, we get along like eggs on toast.

This morning, a conversation that started out giddily talking about my friend's future vacation plans slowly veered towards chatting about our individual finances. I had just picked up a book called The Smart Cookies: How To Make More Money and Get Out of Debt (a FABULOUS financial planning book for women) that I was telling her about. I started bemoaning my "post-wedding/buying our first home" credit-card debt that was hanging over me like a guillotine, and she was lamenting her sizeable student loans (par for the course with her profession) that she was making full payments on every month.

There was a small pause in the conversation, and the dark, oh-so-familiar cloud of financial-shame that rolled in on both of us was palpable. I felt the words bubbling up in my throat. I tried to swallow them, but they just came out. They felt sour coming out of my mouth, and they felt childish. “I just feel like EVERYONE has a parent that has bailed them out, but me. Where is MY financial lifeline?!”

The look on my friend's face said it all. We felt the same way.

I know we aren’t the only millennials who are familiar with this feeling. It is the elephant in the room at a lot of social gatherings. We have both been witness to the "gap" between us and those peers (in school and business) who have had parents fund their school, their living expenses, and who have financially bailed them out on more than one occasion.

There is a gap.

I once had a boyfriend when I was in my early twenties, whose parents were "Bail out" parents. I was constantly amazed and equal parts disdainful at how incredibly different his financial reality was from my own. While I struggled to make my own financial ends meet while in our relationship, his parents would swoop in and pay off his credit cards when he maxed them out. They would also periodically send him money for his rent and for his day-to-day expenses by dropping money into his account unannounced.

I will never forget the day I first met his parents. They pulled into his driveway on a long weekend with a BRAND NEW Volkswagen Golf for him. They gleefully handed him the keys, exclaiming “Just a gift!” After we exchanged niceties, they got into his old Volkswagen car (which they had bought him a few years prior), and drove it away. This was one of the first times that I really witnessed this "gap," leaving me speechless. The clincher was that I was complaining to this same boyfriend a few weeks later about the stress I was carrying for paying for my University courses, being behind on my cell phone bill, and trying to fund a new record, to which he turned to me with a very "mightier than thou" air, and said “Well, I don’t know what YOU do with your money, but you really should be more careful.”

In more recent years, I was at a summer BBQ with a group of women. A woman in the circle started openly bragging about how much savings she and her partner had set aside for their young child’s education fund, and how “all parents should really be putting that money aside for their kids education.” You could feel the shame and stress on the faces of more than a few of the women in the group, who sat silently and stared down at their potato salads and burnt hot dogs. I was burning up from the inside, thinking back to how just the week before, this particular friend had disclosed to me over coffee that her "well to do" parents pay for every cent of her child’s daycare, and how her father often calls every couple of weeks asking if he can send them a couple thousand dollars to "help them out."

It’s like we live on two different planets. I can’t help but think of that famous Donald Trump interview about how when he was starting upon his empire, that his father “gave him a small loan of a million dollars…” These are just a few examples of this gap, but there are many. Not only is there a gap, but arguably there is an assumption from these "Bailed Out" sons and daughters, that somehow WE, the “un-funded underdogs” are somehow the financially irresponsible ones?

For a long time, I thought I was resentful of my own parents for not "bailing me out" when I needed it, but I see now that I'm not. I don't even blame these kids who are bailed out. I just want to point out the gap. I think as a kid, and as a young adult, you just want what the other kids have sometimes. My parents raised me to be a creative, hardworking person, and in a lot of ways, they taught me to save myself, and not wait on a "financial fairy godmother," and that is something that I am now proud of.

I was just in a fabulous business meeting for "Women in the Music Industry" this week, and a fellow musician said to the group: “Remember gals, in life, forward is forward, no matter the speed.” I love this, and it is a good mantra for us kids who continue to build on our lives and careers, penny by penny, and who have taken and continue to take the hard knocks. The "kids" who feel that deep sense of really being "out there on your own" and the low hum of fear that comes with that. These are the kids who push through their fears to muster up the courage to ask for help, not monetarily, but to a friend or mentor, by saying, "Hey, I'm kind of struggling here. Can you meet for coffee?" It's the strength that comes from the silent space you hold at a BBQ or a party, knowing that you aren't beholden to anyone.