Sibling economics

Sibling Economics

Emmet and Jim Rosenfeld are twin brothers who earn vastly different incomes. Emmet wrote about those differences recently in the Post magazine (Family Finances, July 19). His story prompted the Color of Money Question of the Week: Does your sibling (or siblings) make significantly more or less than you and, if so, how does that play out in the family?

Here is what other siblings wrote about their economic differences:

Carrie Nelson of the District says: "While my younger sister would love to pull big figures, her line of work as a vet technician just doesn't lend itself to that. So she settles for less because she LOVES her work."

Kathleen Culberson of Fairfax, Va., got married, had kids and is now divorced. She returned to the job market after years as a stay at home mom and as a result, took a pay cut. Her sister never married.

"We both went to the same private Ivy League college. She makes three to four times what I do. She borrowed my kids when she felt the occasional need to be domestic; she voluntarily paid for one year of college for each child. I think we are both happy with our choices," wrote Culberson.

"I think it takes real effort for someone to 'overlook' the success of a sibling, especially if that someone is a male," says Ellen Mahoney of Jacksonville, Fla. "My younger brother feels some resentment toward other siblings who have more means and that comes out in pointed remarks he occasionally makes."

Carolyn Cihelka of Woodbridge, Va., wrote: "My mother had warned me that finances were a sore subject with my brother, but I mentioned something to him anyway a couple of years ago and he blew up. He said nobody deserved my good situation more than I did, but he didn't want to hear about it ever again. It makes me uncomfortable that there's this just-below the surface resentment of my situation."

Cassandra Logan of Bowie, Md., says, "I am by no means rich, but one of my siblings seems to like to incorporate me into her and my nephew's future plans. Sometimes I know she is joking but I do think there is this expectation that I will always be available as an emergency fund." Logan's nephew is in college. She sends him money monthly, "But," she says, "I don't ever want to feel obligated."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071002341.html?wpisrc=newsletter


Family Finances

As brothers, they shared a birthday and Ivy League educations. Then their bank accounts parted ways.

By Emmet Rosenfeld
Sunday, July 19, 2009



On a weekend trip to visit my twin brother in New York City a year or so ago, we found time to take a run along the Hudson River. As a couple of midcareer dads each with two young sons, our lives had taken parallel paths. Except in one way.

"My bills are killing me this month," said Jim, as we skirted the driving range at Chelsea Piers.

What gee-whiz expense was it this time, I wondered -- $700 a month for off-street parking?

"I wrote 65,000 bucks worth of checks the other night."

"Huh?" I said, assuming I'd misheard.

"I couldn't believe it myself. But I'm floating two mortgages right now until we sell our place; then there's the construction loan on the brownstone, and I had to pay my quarterly taxes. That was about 30 grand right there."

I don't think I broke stride. But emotionally, at that moment, I buckled. I've come to accept over the years our disparity in income: He's a partner in a law firm, and I'm an educator. But right then it struck me just how far apart, financially, we really were.

My brother's monthly nut was almost the same as my entire year's pay.

As we ran, my eyes turned to the swirling currents of the Hudson.

"Ouch," I managed.

***

Before the financial meltdown turned the world upside down, rich wasn't that hard to figure out. Pulling down north of $350,000 a year put you in the top 1 percent of households in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. As a lawyer married to a psychiatrist, my twin and his wife are comfortably in that category. My spouse and I, both career educators, are happy to have finally cracked six figures combined after 15 years in our field.

So, how did twins who grew up playing on the same schoolyards in suburban Washington end up so many rungs apart on the income ladder? And for those of us on the schlub side, is a mid-six-figure salary truly the velvet rope between us and a thinner, tanner version of ourselves? More to the point, would I be happier with my brother's life?

Jim's journey to the courtroom and mine to the classroom began with our parents.

Mom's and Dad's upbringings fell on opposite ends of the bell curve that defined the mid-century spectrum of Jewish possibility. Dad was the son of a Pittsfield, Mass., clothier and a mother who volunteered for social organizations. He grew up playing tennis on clay courts in the family back yard, graduated from Harvard University, and eventually studied Russian at Columbia University on the way to a career as a high-profile journalist for this newspaper.

The daughter of a Providence, R.I., insurance salesman and a bookkeeper, my mother worked her way into Smith College and, later, graduate school at Radcliffe. She was a perennial PTA president whose unflagging civic participation reflected her up-by-the-bootstraps background.

My parents shared the unshakable faith that education and hard work were the bedrocks of success, and expected all four of us children to attend Ivy League schools as they had.

And so, at the public high school we attended, Jim edited the newspaper and played on the tennis team. I was student body president and a soccer midfielder. Jim added the first Yale sticker to the back window of the family wagon, while I slapped one on from Harvard.

It wasn't until after high school that our paths began to diverge. Driving an orange VW Microbus bought with tips from waiting tables, I took the road less traveled and spent part of a gap year in Colorado ski country. By the time I parked my van in Harvard Yard, my twin brother was already a sophomore in New Haven.

I continued to play grasshopper to Jim's ant. The summer after his junior year, Jim worked as an intern with the Washington, D.C., Public Defender Service. I put my formal education on hold again when a summer job teaching kids to swim in rural Alaska stretched into a stint in an Eskimo village as a substitute teacher.

As I huddled with those shivering, raven-haired children around a driftwood fire after lessons, something clicked for me. Not long after my return to Harvard, I enrolled in the School of Education to become a teacher.

Around the time I stood in front of a bunch of high school students for the first time, Jim was getting ready to take the LSATs, and he entered law school soon after. Out of college, I took a job leading outdoor trips with at-risk kids in Minnesota. By then Jim had landed a clerkship with a federal appeals court judge in Denver. My first real job was teaching ninth-grade English; his was on Wall Street.

Fast forward to today. Jim is a partner at a law firm in Manhattan, and I recently became dean of students at a private school in Falls Church, after a decade and a half of teaching in mostly public school classrooms.

I think our differing paths ultimately reflect a difference in temperament more than financial values. Sleeping under spruce trees in Alaska was part of my adolescent attempt to reject the suburban norms that my brother never had the urge to challenge. In clerking for a federal judge, he lived up to family expectations I didn't feel the need to fulfill.

As children, Jim and I embraced the mantra "You split, I choose" to prevent fights. It was absolutely fair: You didn't want to cut that last piece of cake into unequal parts because you'd be stuck with the smaller one. This Solomonic approach taught us to live with our choices. We also learned to keep an eye on the other guy's slice, and we've been doing it ever since.

***

My wife was giving the boys a bath, and I was sitting at my dining room table leafing through a stack of bills one recent evening when the phone rang.

"Did you remember we're coming down this weekend?" asked Jim. His wife, a clinical psychiatrist and researcher, had another conference in Washington.

"Sure," I replied vaguely, tearing open a Social Security statement. The column of numbers inside represented my work history. I considered how the gap between my earning power and my brother's has widened through the years.

"We got the boys into that school I was telling you about," Jim reported. For each son, the tuition is as much as my wife, Courtney, makes per year teaching preschool.

"Congrats," I mumbled. He started saying something about his sitters -- they juggle two to cover all the hours when he and his wife are at work -- but I was only half listening as I scribbled figures on the back of an envelope. There's enough coming in to cover expenses, more or less. As long as a $2,000 car repair bill doesn't hit when there's less.

"What's this check for $530?" I called upstairs to my wife as soon as I hung up.

Even before this recession, keeping a close eye on the bottom line was a depressing but necessary midmonth habit. Like most educators, our belts have always been snug.

"Didn't I ask you to wait until next week to pay the sitter?"

Perversely, while we make more today than we have in the past, things didn't always seem this tight. Before the crash, our house was a piggy bank, allowing us to go to the wine store on the corner just like the 30-something AOL retirees in the trendy neighborhood where we'd settled during the '90s.

Our first home in Del Ray was a little Cape Cod with a galley kitchen and a koi pond out back. I built a white picket fence around the patch of a front yard and planted a maple tree near the garage when our son was born. A few years and another kid later, we waded into the pounding surf of the local housing market. Back then, we got outbid by laughable sums -- once $100,000 -- before finally making an offer on a place a few blocks away for $70,000 over the asking price. Even that amount seemed like Monopoly money when our own starter home sold the next week for $500,000 more than we'd originally paid for it.

"You guys are teachers," I remember Jim saying on his first visit to our handsome, two-story farmhouse on a double lot. "How'd you get a place like this?"

***

The weekend after our phone chat, Jim steered a brand-new Subaru Outback into the driveway, parking behind my used luxury station wagon.

"Nice," I said, trying not to look too impressed. I've never owned a new car in my life.

For him, the vehicle is a practical choice: a people-mover with puke-proof leather seats, not too high-end to garage in the city. Paid for in cash.

"Thanks," he grunted, hauling out the luggage. "And remind me why you're the one with the Audi?"

Our fancy import had come to us with 60,000 miles after a neighborhood teenager deemed it not cool enough to drive to her tony private high school.

Twin math: For more than $30,000 plus a monthly parking bill double my loan payment, my brother got the outdoorsy brand I would have splurged on if I could afford to buy new. For $20,000 less, I'd picked up a used version of the ride he might have driven out of the showroom, if only he weren't strapped with a double mortgage.

"Did that come with the bike rack," I asked, "Or was it extra?"

Later, we sat out back on the deck near the grill, nursing a couple of beers as our sons, ages 4 to 8, played in the yard. I'd rebuilt the deck, enjoying the satisfaction of knowing I'd done it myself, the sort of feeling that budget-conscious teachers tend to experience a lot more than time-strapped lawyers.

We chatted as the boys made their alliances and began an assault on the woodpile. Wiffle bats littered the lawn, and a playground ball bounced toward the butterfly bush.

"Easy on the flowers," I called. "And watch out for land mines." The dogs panted under the picnic table.

"Man," said my brother, gazing around the neatly fenced area. "You don't know what a yard like this would cost in Brooklyn." There was a note of envy in his voice I couldn't help but savor, maybe because I know it all too well.

***

A month or two later, I eased into a parking space right in front of my brother's new brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.

"We made it," I declared to the kids, groggy in the back seat.

"That's it?" asked my wife, sizing up the nondescript stairs leading to a heavy wooden door. For the past year, the real estate saga had unfolded: the slow sale of the Chelsea condo, the purchase of this place complete with prickly downstairs neighbor, the dizzyingly over-budget renovation. We'd wondered along the way why anyone would buy the top three floors of anything without getting a back yard.

"There's Uncle Jimmy!" called the boys.

"I haven't gotten that parking spot since we moved in," he greeted us. "Welcome to Brooklyn."

Jim dropped our bags in a room sparsely furnished with two raspberry chairs and a foldout couch. "You'll be here," he said. "The boys are down the hall." Already, the kids were dumping bins of plastic dinosaurs onto the floor.

"And here," he said, as we followed him upstairs to the next level, "is the rest." I suddenly knew what real estate agents mean by the "wow" factor. A dining area with a dramatic two-story ceiling lay before us, an open kitchen at one end and a tastefully appointed living room at the other. White columns sprang from creamy antique pine floors, leading the eye to the level above, where glass panels hovered between stainless steel railings on the landing. The furniture was Danish modern; the sound system zoned. A brand-new flat-screen TV hung on an invisible mount beyond the Arts and Crafts mantle. Across from it, modular bookshelves floated against one wall.

Overlooking all was a glass-walled master suite with gauzy curtains. This, I thought as I took in the scene, is a sweet house.

Later, we went for a jog, just as we had a year earlier. I felt the familiar electricity of running in the city, but the landscape was new to me. "This area is called Dumbo," Jim tour-guided, "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass."

We ran past spray-painted doors and decrepit buildings where artists keep lofts, though most of the Bohemian pioneers have already been chased out by the inexorable creep of monied couples from Manhattan. Suddenly the East River appeared before us.

"That's the Brooklyn Bridge, right?" I asked.

"Yeah, and they're going to turn all these piers into parks and stuff," Jim said, waving his arm at the line of old docks that stretched to the south. I pictured the scene for a moment: hopscotching greensward packed with high-net-worth couples pushing $900 strollers.

We paused to stretch on one of the barren piers. Wall Street glittered across the water, and just downriver, with her back to us, the Statue of Liberty held her torch aloft.

"How's the new job?" asked Jim.

"Good," I grunted. "No more getting home at four in the afternoon."

Seven is closer to normal these days, at which hour I'm greeted at the door by the nuzzling of an under-exercised dog, the fried-onion smell of red sauce on the stove, and a third-grader calling for help with his homework.

"That's not so bad," lamented Jim. "If I know I can't get home for bedtime, I'll call the boys at 7:30 and then stay at work till midnight."

By this time, we were running again, circling back to the house. To the steady rhythm of our steps, I mulled the ebb and flow of anxiety over money that has come with being an educator. Was being home for bath time worth it?

I got an answer of sorts later that evening as I watched my brother thumb his BlackBerry to answer West Coast e-mails while the rest of us sat around drinking his expensive Scotch and playing our version of "Six Degrees of Separation" on Facebook. The kids were zonked, and the last dishwasher load had finally run.

"Dude, check this out," I chuckled. A friend from fifth grade popped up on the screen.

"One minute," Jim said, frowning.

A while later, I headed for the stairs, leaving Jim splayed out in a modern chair, his BlackBerry idle at last. "Don't stay up too late," I called.

It's best to go to bed with the score tied.

Emmet Rosenfeld is dean of students at the Congressional Schools of Virginia and a teacher consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project. He can be reached at emmet.rosenfeld@gmail.com.