Stupid Money

The song If I Had a Million Dollars needs to be adjusted for inflation. I had this thought the other day while driving home. If I had a million dollars I wouldn’t even be able to buy a house in the neighborhood I live in, a neighborhood that by all appearances is clearly middle class.

A couple years ago I re-read the short story The Swimmer by John Cheever and I remember thinking how much has changed and how much the middle class has been lost. The middle class hasn’t been lost we simply lost track of who the middle class is. A book I read a bit ago referred to doctors and lawyers and business owners as, “working-call affluent,” not even middle-class mind you. Working-class but with money.

That’s where we are. The middle class are playing in the NFL making $20 million a year. Everyone else is working class, and then there are the upper-class, a new breed of robber barons, but unlike the Vanderbilts, Disneys, and Carnegies of yesteryear they aren’t opening amusement parks, hospitals, and universities. There is no noblesse oblige with these dudes. They’ll privatize space travel and use it as another source of income. Selling tickets to the celebrity middle-class.

Dealing with my father’s estate has pulled back the curtain of society and I have not liked what I have seen. I am in a position of handling larger sums of money than I ever thought I would in my life, but it isn’t stupid money. It is smart money. It can grow and modest investments can become large investments, but I’ve got to be smart with it, and it isn’t my money. In my mindset it never will be. It is money that is currently my mother’s and eventually it is money owed to the future of the family.

Being smart is taxing and often beyond my capabilities. Having stupid money would be much easier, and by the way a million dollars in 1988 when Barenaked Ladies released If I Had a Million Dollars would be worth $2.8 million in todays money which doesn’t have the same ring to it. Either way I am grateful for the position I am in even if I wouldn’t mind a duffel bag with $28 mil from the getting place, but that comes with other problems.