Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

Though still on hiatus, I still have a few posts lingering waiting to be published. Here’s the first one.

Last week, the WSJ had a Personal Journal article about the rising cost of tuition at private schools around the country. My K-12 school was featured. I attended it for 7 years, 6 on scholarship. It’s the kind of school where both parents are Ivy League grads, doctors married to lawyers type of thing. It’s been mentioned in Wealth Magazine as an Ivy League feeder school. It’s true. My closest friend went to Harvard. Her back up school was Yale. Ex-boyfriend? Brown, but Yale was his first choice.

The secret reason why I am so interested in my net worth is so that when I am gone and there’s stuff leftover, I want it to go to my school for scholarship money. The school has been around for a long time and I’m sure the endowment rivals that of some small colleges. In the almost 15 years since my graduation, tuition for grade 12 has more than doubled, to over $20K. It’s now out of range for some of those white collar parents who struggled to pay their own loans off for professional school.

I got so much from going to my school, wonderful mentoring, fantastic intellectual freedom and stimulation, a love of athletics I would not naturally have. I have a mandate from one of my teachers who did something very special and wonderful for me, ‘When you have the chance to do something like this for someone else, you will do it.’ When the person you adore most gives you a purpose in life, you can do nothing but be inspired and take it on as your mission to the world.

The other thing is that I learned at school was how to be rich. It sounds like a weird thing to say, but there were some really stinkin’ rich people that went there, but you’d never know it. They embodied the Millionaire Next Door mindset. Really classy rich people don’t spend tons of money dressing their kids in the latest fashions. They don’t give them flashy cars to drive (some did, but were *frowned* upon by the other kids as being stuck up). They spend their money wisely and put it towards things they really enjoy, sailing trips, second houses at the shore, etc. These parents didn’t dump us at the mall to entertain ourselves. They had expectations of us to do and be more, developing ourselves as human beings.

Upon graduation, a classmate of mine gave me Life’s Little Instruction Book as a present. There’s only one thing in there that really sticks out to me. Let me paraphrase “Buy the best house you can, not the best car.” That kind of immortalizes the things I learned from the upper-middle class to upper class people I mingled with at school.

Just some stuff to think about.