Splurge on things that carry lasting value.
My mom was a smart girl from a blue collar family who grew up in 1940s Boston. She never made it to college, but did make it as far as New York City, where she worked for Eastern Airlines in the 1950s. My father was a local boy a couple of years older than she was. They grew up a few blocks from each other, but it took a double date in Manhattan for them to get together. My dad liked her sharp wit and her style, and even though she was his best friend’s date, somehow the two couples switched partners mid-dinner, and each rearranged couple went on to marry. My mother scored herself a tall handsome boy with an MBA in finance and a job on Wall Street. That was the definition of “making it” for a girl in 1950s America.
I grew up with all the advantages of the hard work my parents put in to make it out of lower middle class Boston, to become shiny upper middle class New Yorkers. My brother and I went to an elite private school, had a relatively spacious apartment in the Gramercy Park area, and a huge old summer house on Cape Cod too. For Christmas when I was three or four, my dad splurged on a showy ring my mom had designed for herself—a platinum cocktail ring with a giant emerald-cut aquamarine and an army of chunky accent diamonds flanking it on two sides. It was a secret exactly how much he spent on it, but the rumor was it cost as much as his brand new Chrysler New Yorker. For years, my mom would complain that the jeweler made a second ring in her exact design and showcased it in his shop window. She felt he was infringing on her design, and she was both angered by and proud of the fact. In private moments, my mom always reminded me that someday the big glamorous aquamarine ring would be mine—along with her wedding ring, pearls and the other more modest items in her jewelry box.
Someday came sooner than she expected. The cancer kicked in when I was eight. She survived it, but the after effects of the radical surgery were brutal. Within six month, my mother was dead, and my life changed drastically. My dad moved us out of 1970s Manhattan, to live full-time at our Cape house, and relocated his Wall Street job to Boston, at a significant pay cut, in order to have more time to raise us kids in relative safety and peace.
Within a few years, my dad remarried, and then divorced. The trauma of being a sudden widower and a single dad and now a divorced single dad with a messy divorce under his belt and a less-than-satisfying career took their toll on him, and on me. The teenaged years did not help. There were scenes, and fights, and attempts at running away, and finally I flew the coop for real. Looking back, it is hard to explain why I left, or why he let me leave. It was nothing either of us would have imagined five or ten years earlier, when I was his princess and he was my hero. But one day when I was sixteen, I found myself homeless in Boston.
Back then, as now, there were all these dramatic stereotypes about street kids: we were on drugs, we were prostitutes—neither was at all true of any of the kids I knew. Mostly, we were just unlucky kids who scraped and schemed and improvised to get by. Still, alone, afraid, too young to earn a living, and perpetually hungry, I did the one thing I never thought I’d do: I sold the beautiful aquamarine ring my mother had left me. I don’t know what she paid for it, but I know I sold it for $400. I still remember the feeling of the money in my hand. The man at the jewelry store on Washington Street short-changed me, but he also didn’t ask for my ID. He knew I was too young to own, much less sell, a piece of jewelry like that. The money from the ring payed my flophouse rent and fed me for a couple of weeks. And then it was gone, along with the hopes my mother must have had when she imagined me wearing it one day, all grown up and settled and safe.
It crushed me to sell that ring. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been a scared, hungry kid with nowhere else to turn. I remember thinking, “Why the hell did she leave me this stupid ring?” I wished she had spent her money on stock, or life insurance, or something that would have better protected me when things went wrong in life. But she was a blue collar girl who was celebrating having made it by buying herself something nice. In 20th century America, in my mom’s mind, the socio-economic ladder of mobility moved up, never back down again, much less below where one had started out. There was no world in which she could have imagined life to take the turns it did for her daughter.
My point is this: you never know what will happen in life. No matter how safe and secure you are right now, you can never know what the future holds. Don’t spend your money buying expensive totems that make you feel like you’ve “made it”— expensive watches, pricey cars, designer shoes and clothes that’ll go out of style after a few seasons. When you dream of leaving things for your kids, leave them stocks. Leave them life insurance. Leave them your wedding ring, your class ring, a few family treasures, fine. But if you are tempted to leave them a Rolex or a giant expensive diamond, take my advice and think again. Leave them something that will appreciate in value—something with a tangible documentable resale value. And teach them to do the same for their kids.
A quick search of 1stdibs.com reveals that a fine quality estate platinum aquamarine and diamond ring similar to my mom’s sells for for between $5000-$20,000 today. Had my parents spent their $3000 ring money on shares of Proctor & Gamble stock (PG) instead of jewelry back in 1969, the same amount of money would be worth somewhere in the area of $14.4 million* today, including stock splits and dividends.
*calculated at https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
Athena Northwest Capital 