It’s now been 90 years since the Great Depression, yet its consequences still echo in my daily life. Passed on from my grandparents, the experiences of the Depression shape my mentality and my decisions about money and the future.
In 1929 when the stock market crashed, all four of my grandparents were 8 years old. They heard every day about the 4 million — later 11 million, later 13 million — people out of work. They heard about the huge pay cuts working people had to take in order to keep their jobs. And their families experienced the fallout firsthand.
Two out of four grandparents experienced scarcity at a level that I can only imagine. Their mothers thinned the soup with water to make “enough” for everyone around the table. My grandparents worked full days in the fields as children.
One day at school, my grandma’s teacher asked a little girl where her lunch was. “It’s not my turn to eat today,” the girl explained. Low on food, she and her siblings were evidently alternating days to eat lunch.
But all four of my grandparents responded to the scarcity in different ways. They grew into different kinds of people as they built their own households in the 1940s.
While my mom’s parents were fearful and “we can’t afford”, my dad’s parents operated from an abundance mentality of “Let’s see how much fun we can have with what we *can* afford!!”
In spite of similar income levels, my two sets of grandparents might as well have lived in different universes. They had a completely different life mindsets.
Mom’s family — Fearful Frugality
My mom’s dad grew up subsistence farming in the ’30s. He was raised on a diet of ceaseless work and harsh parenting. He does not have happy memories of childhood bliss. It was a bleak time.
As an adult, Granddad lived in fear. He never wanted to return to that time or put his kids in a ‘work-ourselves-to-death’ situation. So he constantly pinched pennies and worried over money.
Mom says with chagrin that her parents chose the paint color of her room based on what was on sale. It was a color so ugly that someone else had returned it.
It must have felt to my mom more like she was a financial liability than a treasured daughter.
Being frugal was tough on the kids. There was no explanation for why they worked so hard. There seemed to be no reason they were doing without ketchup or digging their own basement, no goal of some good to come of the money they saved as a family by working hard.
Frugality was a burden to bear, not a happiness booster.
Dad’s family — Abundant Frugality
My dad’s mother grew up in a small town: 1 of 8 kids with barely enough to get by on. Her mother was sick with tuberculosis and had to go away to the sanitorium in the 30s. My grandma doesn’t focus on deprivation, though. She remembers times with her siblings, chores, school. She remembers little tidbits like her mother thinning the soup when company came over, so there would be enough broth to go around.
Once my grandparents got married, they started raising their 5 kids on a lower middle-class income. But they were happy. Granddad used to say, “I might not have a lot of money, but I am rich in my kids.”
This mentality was the key to creating a different type of frugal mindset than my mom’s parents.
My grandparents tried not to let money worries get in the way of living. They found ways to add fun to their kids’ lives that didn’t involve buying stuff.
Abundance mentality make the difference between frugality being a fun, creative endeavor and it sucking the life out of you.
My dad’s mother LOVED Christmas — wrapping, decorating, singing carols — all of it. Home Ec degree in hand, Grandma figured out how to make the holiday special without breaking the budget.
Her magic was in making practical gifts special, telling the kids they couldn’t have those school supplies or that new sweater until Christmas. She stockpiled practical items like coats, underwear, and books all year, waiting to wrap them in bows and put them under the Christmas tree.
Even with their ho-hum practical gifts, the kids had tons of anticipation. Grandma made sure that they had the excitement of unwrapping lots of little packages. She also engaged them in special [practical] traditions at Christmas — helping her make taffy (most of which was eaten mid-process heheheh…) and cookies from family recipes.
I still feel the effects of my grandparents’ mentalities. I work to balance them and to lean towards abundance rather than fear, even as I read disaster in every news headline.
On a personal level, fear can easily paralyze me if I let it. Even in the 4 years since I started my software job, things I used to do are now done by computers. There will come a time when I will be outsourced to a machine learning algorithm.
Other days, I feel scared when I get a surprise $700 medical bill, as happened last month.
Looking at their tough childhoods, I see why my mom’s parents were so terrified. You don’t come out of such terrible, back-breaking times unscathed.
But I want to have a choice. I want to find ways to embrace an abundance mentality even when I can’t afford everything. I want to think about what I *can* afford, to be driven by excitement. I want to stop experiencing life as a series of unfortunate events and instead be empowered by my ability to find creative solutions to my expenses.
It takes mental strength to do this, to focus on the good and not let the fear gnaw at you. I hope I can have the courage to bravely keep going, to allow my heart to fill with gratitude even when tomorrow is uncertain.