I identify as Gen X even though I was technically born in the last week of the Baby Boom, and my generational cohort is taking a lot of grief from a lot of young people — by whom I mean anybody not of driving age when 9/11 happened. The rap is this: the older folks rigged the game and, to the extent they have gotten out of the way (Boomers being accused of selfishly clinging to power, prestige, and position long after their sell-by date), we have left subsequent generations an economic Schiff sandwich. Some of this critique is justified — those kooky kids today are right that they got served up an unprecedented set of obstacles and challenges to success. But us crusties have a point too: if you’re regularly dropping your cash on the proverbial $20 burrito, you’re doing money management wrong.

Basically, things fiscally suck for young people, but things have always fiscally sucked for young people, and the only way through it is through it.

When we hear younger folk complain how everything sucks, our usual move is to explain how things sucked for us. And things did suck for us. I was making $3.10 an hour mopping out the stalls at the Foster City Carl’s Jr. in 1981. I moved up in the world across the street to McDonald’s, where I slung Big Macs for $3.35 an hour. I got fired from Denny’s along the way for gross incompetence. And in 1988, I was pulling in $1,286.10 a month as a second lieutenant. I did freelance writing in the ’90s and wrote trivia questions and jokes for bar trivia games. I built a law firm after leaving a bigger law firm — I brought in Circuit City as a client as a second-year lawyer and got offered the same bonus of $500 as the associate they caught sleeping under his desk; my counteroffer was that I keep everything. What that meant was long hours, risk, and that everyone else got paid before I did. If we didn’t make money one month, I didn’t make money. And I was a reservist during that time, and my active duty did not count........

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