Originally Posted by
Nil_Drift
The secret is not a secret, it's called financial responsibility, and I taught her so I'm proud about it.
There's a difference between instilling budgetary discipline in your children (obviously a good thing, although I am not sure it has ever been properly taught in school) and the sweeping statements often trotted along the lines that 'the macro issues facing the younger generation would all go away if only they'd buy fewer posh coffees and eat out less often'. I hear that argument from older people so often and with so little variation of terms that I rather suspect it's been pushed by the likes of the Mail and Telegraph, but I digress. The crucial point is, there is no amount of budgetary discipline that will enable a young family today to replicate the economic trajectory of an identical family starting out in the 70s or 80s.
You don't mention property or children in your description of your daughter's lifestyle. Unless society as a whole is willing to increase reliance on expensive IVF, or return to the bygone norm of older financially-secure men marrying fertile young women - neither of which I think we are - we need an economy which enables people to start families no later than their mid-thirties. It may be that your daughter has achieved some spending power because she is yet to start a family, or perhaps shares her home with others. If so, I would join you in being delighted that she as an individual is able to make choices and do more than just get by, but in the wider societal context I would hardly see her situation as a ringing endorsement of the idea that exhorting budgetary discipline is the most important thing we can do for the younger generations.
[If, on the other hand, she is raising a family on the minimum wage while sitting on a savings pot and taking holidays with friends, then she is super-human and you should be earning good money as a personal finance coach!]