Maybe She’s Born with It, Maybe Her Mom’s the CFO of Kraft Heinz

Almost 10 years ago, I lived in a city surrounded by hordes of other early 20-somethings. We were Venn diagrams of friend groups connected by mutual acquaintances or college roommates, hailing from all over the country and bringing unique backgrounds that were mostly unknown to one another. 

When you’re growing up, you usually know why Melissa’s house is so big (her parents are radiologists) or how Derek got a BMW for his 16th birthday (his grandpa owns the dealership). This intimate generational knowledge provides a backstory for their circumstances, but the people you meet in early adulthood are relative mysteries. The fact that it’s in this latter stage of life when you begin scrutinizing your finances lends these concealed pasts extra intrigue. 

Some of us worked in healthcare, others in the airline industry or tech. A few others were still in school, law or otherwise. None of us earned a ton of money. There was the occasional six-figure earner barely squeaking past the $100,000 mark, but nobody pulling in multiples of it.

“The most challenging to parse were those on the cusp of plausibility.”

I wasn’t yet a self-proclaimed personal finance nerd, so the lifestyles surrounding me were often confounding. There was the entry-level executive assistant who drove the brand-new Lexus and lived in a one-bedroom apartment with humongous walk-in closets, the couple who owned a gorgeous home in our city’s upscale suburb despite neither holding a job that could explain such a purchase, and mostly, there was a lot of discretionary spending at bars, restaurants, boutique gyms, and shops. The most challenging to parse were those on the cusp of plausibility: Yeah, he’s an electrical engineer…but a penthouse and a doorman? A lot of it didn’t add up. 

Over time, an uncomfortable disorientation seeped in. My lifestyle looked nothing like theirs, yet I knew enough to deduce we were in relatively similar pay bands. I was fumbling for different ways to ask the same awkward question—How are you pulling this off?—which was usually a translation of an even more uncomfortable itch: I must be doing something wrong.

Now that I’m loosely aligned with a network of folks who hustle in their free time to speed up their wealth accumulation process, I know what “normal person” quick progress looks like—and this wasn’t it.

In my confusion, I concocted theories.

“Maybe they know which hot stocks to invest in.”

“Maybe they found a really talented lender and accountant. Do I need an accountant?”

“Maybe they have some of that ‘passive income’ I keep hearing about on Instagram.” 

“The real answer is the world’s oldest riddle: What’s great if you can get it but absolutely befuddling if you can’t? Family money.”

Having no idea how investing worked at the time, my imagination filled in the gaps with increasingly unlikely explanations. Of course, now I look back and know better. The real answer is the world’s oldest riddle: What’s great if you can get it but absolutely befuddling if you can’t? Family money.

This knowledge has been one of the greatest side effects of learning how saving and investing works. It lifts the mysterious mathematical fog shrouding illogical situations, simplifying and ventilating feelings of shame or inadequacy. You know Jennifer earns $54,000 but owns a $900,000 home in the part of town with the best walkable coffee shops? It’s not a secret, hard-to-find mortgage product that you’re too unsavvy to access or a first-time homeowner program for which you missed the application period. It’s—say it with me!—family money. We shouldn’t begrudge Jennifer; though, of course we’re human, so we might. I know if I were offered a three-bedroom hand-me-down from some wealthy relative, I’d gladly accept, too. 

Still, it’s good to know: If a person is inexplicably well off, someone who came before them must’ve put in the time and compounding on their behalf. This is great news. It means you can adjust your comparison standard for the inflation of rich parents and quit blaming yourself. 

Comparing yourself to others is almost always fraught, but in the uncertain throes of early adulthood, it can be an irresistible (and somewhat practical) measuring stick. Comparison is how we make sense of ourselves in a world without absolutes. It’s natural. But to be helpful, it must first be calibrated accurately.

In 1% of scenarios, you’ll encounter that adolescent freak of nature who, at age 12, cornered the lawn-mowing market in their suburb and funneled the proceeds directly into pre-stock split AMZN, and her million-dollar home at 25 years old is merely evidence of her prodigious entrepreneurial acumen and ability to allocate capital. But this is, far and away, the exception to the rule. 

“Does someone whose parents put down the money for their first home report an inheritance on a survey?”

Here, people will point to surveys about inheritance and claim that “fewer than 20% of people inherit their wealth,” but we must take a wider (and less literal) view: I wouldn’t check “yes” on a survey asking if I inherited my wealth, but my parents allowed me to graduate debt-free, gave me a car, and paid for most of my wedding. Just because their contributions to my bottom line prevented it from becoming negative rather than boosted it into six-figure territory doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from the choices they made. Does someone whose parents put down the money for their first home report an inheritance on a survey? 

Self-reported data about how and why someone has what they do isn’t a reliable gauge of the phenomenon I’m describing here, which relies less on giant, one-time cash transfers and more on a consistent pattern of compounding small advantages over many years—from receiving rent stipends to covertly using a parent’s AmEx for groceries, insurance, and gas or accessing your dad’s Delta miles for semifrequent first-class international trips. For all our talk about generational wealth, it’s fairly challenging to quantify where a relative’s benevolence ends and a young person’s self-sufficiency begins. 

Still, some of it is quantifiable: The 25-year-old in Manhattan whose parents foot the bill for all fixed expenses such that a meager entry-level salary can be spent entirely on discretionary whims is providing a boost that, to an outsider, would appear nonsensical. If you didn’t know any better, it’d be easy to assume that you must be uniquely failing at capitalism, rather than simply having been dealt a hand that looks more like a foot.

“Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe…oh, wait. Yeah. She’s born with it.”

But one of the first lessons you learn in any personal finance education (at least, that which doesn’t come from someone trying to sell you a crypto arbitrage course) is that there are no shortcuts. You must either earn a lot of money, invest consistently for a long time, or some combination of the two. In the absence of both, you can assume a third path:

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe…oh, wait. Yeah. She’s born with it.