Recipient: Martha Baumgarten Occupation: Student, Baby-sitter, shelves books at library Responded On: February 25 , 2005 Bill Received In: Oak Park, Illinois Originally Dropped At: Great Harvest Bread Company 736 Lake Street Oak Park, Illinois On: February 5, 2005

 

Martha Baumgarten's Comments

Does your generation view money differently from your parents' generation, and if so, how?
I don’t think there’s much of a difference between the view of money between my generation and my parents’ generation. But I think there’s a lot less of a difference between me and my parents than say, my parents and their parents.

What do you mean by that? How do you perceive that your parents view money differently than your grandparents?
I think my grandparents generation was a lot more concerned with
spending. And you weren’t supposed to go over a certain limit on
spending and you weren’t supposed to spend a lot.

But I think my parents’ generation sees that it’s okay to have the big screen TV or the McMansion or whatever … You know, it’s okay to spend extra money on something that you don’t really need.

And that's how you view it? That it is ok to spend extra money on something you may not really need, but it's something that you really would like to have?
Yes. Within reason.

And what is “within reason?” Where do you draw the line?
I guess the line’s different for everybody. But you’re going too far
when you have to buy all these extra things but you can’t pay your
bills or pay your mortgage. It differs for each person. But as long as you’re able to live with the things you need, like you can pay for food and pay, you know, for the extras—for the fancy vacation to the Caribbean and stuff.

In the United States, if people start out in a very low-paying job, can they still become quite wealthy if they work hard enough?
I think it’s possible, but it’s very hard and that there’s lots of
burdens to overcome.

Such as?
Well, for many people there’s race issues or disability issues. There’s also … You need a certain level of education and often if you don’t get that level of education early in your lifetime, it’s very hard to get it later in your lifetime.

And there’s also a lot more low-paying positions open than high paying positions. So you have to actually get into the right job at the right time.

Is money distributed in a fair way in the United States?
I think that in some ways it is and in some ways it isn’t. Like the
whole point of the American system is that you work for what you have. So in theory each person earns what they deserve. But at the same time, I think taxes are kind of distributed unfairly.

Like Bush’s inauguration was financed by Washington D.C. taxpayers and it cost like millions and millions of dollars and those people didn’t give their tax money to finance Bush’s inauguration. They paid their taxes to help their communities, so I don’t think you can really make the argument that money is really distributed totally fairly when there’s homeless people in Washington, DC. There’s starving people. There’s community centers that need help. And we just spend millions of dollars on an inauguration that was basically a big party.

Are people fairly compensated for the kind of work they do?
I think absolutely not. There’s so many people like gardeners and
landscapers and maids who do physical labor that most corporate
executive and doctors wouldn’t even dream of doing, but they are paid often below minimum wage because many of them are illegal immigrants.

And then you have teachers and like medical technologists who run the tests in the hospital … and lead our nation’s youth … and they are paid not very much at all … They are paid a very poor salary. And when they do try to unionize … Like for instance our teachers union at my high school just almost went on strike. And they were going on strike because their vacation time was being cut.

And their vacation time got cut. And now they’re being paid less to
lead extra-curricular activities. They didn’t strike in the end because they didn’t think they’d eventually get what they want. I just think that’s ridiculous that doctors can go away for, you know, weeks at a time but our teachers like can’t even get enough sick days to take care of their own children …

Or like gardeners. They don’t get time off. Many of them are illegal immigrants. They’ll be fired if they have to take care of a relative or something.

Many doctors work very hard. But there’s also like the doctors at the top of the chain who basically just fill out paperwork and direct other doctors and fix small problems and they’re paid a lot of money. And I don’t think that’s fair.

In your household, how do you economize?
In our household we go to like CostCo and price clubs to buy large quantities of things when we know we’re going to eat a lot for like a potluck. Or for a big extended family dinner we’ll often buy like the name-brand things at stores and use a lot of coupons.

When we go on vacation, my mom has a time-share in South Africa which is cheaper than a time-share here and she trades it for time shares in America. So we end up paying what most people would pay for two nights in a hotel … We get to stay there a week. So that saves us a lot of money on vacation.

What will your household splurge on sometimes?
Well recently we bought a high-definition TV. That was a big deal
because we rarely buy new electronics and we bought a high-definition TV. And we have cable, which we didn’t get until me and my bother were older children. So that’s still considered a splurge in our household.

And we have three computers which is probably not necessary but we’re all kind of computer junkies.

If you could do any kind of work to earn money, what kind of work would it be?
I’d really like to be like a research sociologist—study humans and
human behavior … Sociology and psychology are kind of like my passions since I was really little … Just studying people and seeing how they interact. And if I couldn’t do that I really like children. I work with children well. And I’d like to be a child psychiatrist when I grow up.

Can you tell us what the going rate is for baby-sitting these days?
I guess it depends on the family and the area and the amount of
children. But I usually make anywhere from like six or seven dollars an hour for two or three kids to—sometimes I baby-sit for six or seven kids at a time at church things and then I usually get about ten dollars an hour because that’s a lot of kids.

Tell us about kids your age and how they earn money.
A lot of girls babysit. I live in a very, like, affluent suburb so a
lot of kids do get some allowance so their job isn’t their only source of money, if they have a job. Since I’m 16 and my friends are turning 16 that’s like the minimum age to work at restaurants around here so many kids will work at like Starbucks or other restaurants—not so much McDonald’s … some McDonald’s and other stuff around here … A lot of people will like mow lawns in the summer and shovel walks in the winter … Like for instance I and like six other people work at the library basically shelving books and like subbing for librarians throughout the week.

Do you hope to be wealthy someday?
Yes, I guess so. But I don’t hope to be extravagantly wealthy and have like a house in the suburbs of Chicago and a house up in Michigan and a house down in Florida and have like 3 cars. I don’t need all that. I just want to be comfortable and I want to have children. So I want to be able to raise my children so that they have opportunities in life and can do what they want and be successful too.

What does college cost these days, and do you think you get your money's worth?
I can’t even fathom how much college is going to cost in the end
because well state schools cost so much less than a private school but the colleges I’m looking at right now … I’m a sophomore—are all out of state. And then there’s student loans and books and housing and all that stuff. Like I can’t even fathom. It’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And I’m not sure if you get your money’s worth. Because although it is great to have a college education and society has kind of made it necessary to have a college education, very few people would dream of paying that much for like taking high school classes … And I’m taking many AP classes, which are college level classes.

And once you get done with college, although you have this piece of paper it’s often not actually applicable in your workplace. Like a
bachelor of arts, you will almost never use in your job.

So I think it’s WAY MORE than it needs to be and I kind of don’t
understand why it has to be so much, sometimes …