I hate when my parents generation tells us we’re lazy while currently we are funding their retirment ( literally, we have a parent fund in our budget). Honestly most of the young people I know are workign their butts either at finishing school while working 2 jobs to pay huge tuition fees, starting business, innovating, raising families with no family support, ( we live in oil country many move here away from family) or work massive over time because guess what thats what we have to do.

The difference is we PLAN. We know noone is going to save our butts with retirment funds, or unemployment, or anything else really. Pensions and benefits are hard to come by, thanks to the previous generation of execs.

We also have a greater access to education and information, and we use it.

Now the next thing. Stop generalizing, just because your kids are lazy and whine and complain, doesn’t mean we all do. Just like we can generalize that our parents generation is bad with their money, spend beyond their means and hope the government will bail them out, and whine all the time about how their retirment should be better.

Well except for the 40,000 tax bill we had to pay last year, I’d sure like to whine about that.

What I’m concerned with is the idea of our youth ( yes I am assuming the writer to be Super Awesome and Young) toward work. 4 hour work weeks? They want to measure success by how little they do, not what they accomplish.

They want to be paid great money, live like a millionaire and in debt, get gifts from mommy and daddy instead of giving them.

But who wants to change the world. Who wants to do more. Show me somebody that makes other people’s lives better? I’m afraid young people think about work as a honey pot. Where all they have to do is push a button and complain about how hard they work.

We live in the greatest times, we have more time on our hands than ever before to learn, paint, sculpt, play, dance and read. I’m hopefull that the leaders of this new generation will not be the bloggers, but the doers. The inventors. The helpers.

We need to create, not just consume.

Congratulations on your hard work and doing right by your kids. You inspire me to do more not less.

My kids and I had to be pretty well organized, but that serves both my kids well, even today. It meant they both had to be very responsible for themselves, like getting homework done, and picking out their clothes for the next day, completing their chores before I got home, etc. but these habits also still serve them well today. I recently asked my son if he ever felt ‘cheated’ because I put in so many hours working when he was a child. He looked at me with a surprised look, and said “Are you kidding? You took us on vacations, did things with us whenever you could, and always made sure life was never boring. It was the greatest non-school education a kid could ever hope for. The other kids were jealous of all the things we got to do because of you.”

Because I chose to be a workaholic back then, I could retire comfortably at 50. Now I am having the time of my life playing with my grandchildren, going places when I want to, doing what I want, while I’m still young enough to do them. My kids love it when I take the grandkids for a few days. They tell me that the kids always come home happy and much smarter. I don’t know about that, but I’m loving being able to do it when I want to. We go places like museums and art galleries, we do science experiments, we build things, we take things apart to see how they work…the latest victim was my toaster…next week we’ll put it back together.

Becoming a workaholic, and managing my money judiciously when I was younger has enabled me to have the life I want, now. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Try to make as much money as you can while still enjoying life…

John DeFlumeri Jr

Saving 90% is better than awesome. It’s….well, it’s super awesome.