How our parents raised us in the 90’s.
As i’m typing this, my mind lingers in the past. I try not to write something too complex, nor too shady. As a graduated finance student, i try to find myself in this field for years, I try to read complex finance books — without too much knowledge in my head, whenever i encountered some pitfalls, i would google and barely survived. I try my best to locate what i have learnt and how to relate with the society, especially whenever involves money. For some says, graduate finance is a good major.. I would object, what we have learnt for years might still not enough to be proud off and i would very embarrassed if there would be one of my lecturer happened to read my 2 cents story 🙏
In contrast, people now are much more aware about the inflation and recession, and some even made self-study about the fiscal policy and such. I am amazed, that’s brilliant. To make it much more simple, inflation is like your face value is much lower than the price of what you’re gonna buy. You face it a lot? RM10 now is totally different with RM10 in the 90’s. I wonder whether i have that feeling, is it because i was super young and totally had no commitments, my parents paid everything for me, or is it i didn’t know what it takes to make a living?
The answer is yes, i didn’t know the responsibilities yet.
However, i still remember when i was a kid, ayah used to back with a full basket of vegies, and a stack of potatoes to serve us like the hyenas. Ayah was a technician on JKR, mom was a fulltime housewife but made other part time around neighbourhoods, life was moderate, we weren’t able to eat fancy dishes like prawns, chicken or meat on daily but we had a blast on dried anchovies, potatoes, stack of onions..yummm. a stack of eggs, and sometimes if we were lucky, we would get to have dried prawns. Those days, my schoolmate parents were almost like my parents, a single earner in a family. The parents fed us well and managed to brought us into the Universities, with a single income in a household.
Now, i try to find what are the possibilities, casualties that made it almost impossible to do that on this sense now?
As time passes by, we have seen and we have learnt that price has preceded before we prepared, in increasing our income. How this could happen?
To understand this, as our country prosper with good economy, people have much power to buy their needs and when this hit at a peak level, we can see that the cost of goods relatively increases and as a result, the inflation occurs. Hence, the value that you have right now relatively much different than you have on 20 years ago, even 10 years ago.
Another reason that could be answer why our parents could afford us into the University is the existence on subsidies, you name it- petrol, basic grocery needs, enormous fund on scholarships, and even pilgrimage.
And now to answer how about the stagnant salaries over the decades?
This could be a mixed of several factors, one of it for sure, the increasing population growth on this era, which the University graduates is a norm, there’s no special about it, unless the persuasion to make a difference and accelerate it to be much better, that could be much one of the possibilities happened. The rampant economic changes have made the population need to evolve with current technology advances, new enterprises, new business models and new social models.
If this issue put a blame on the Government side, I’m pretty sure that Government all around the world couldn’t much to interfere with global market forces, however this issue could be not too distinct and they should try narrowing the gap.
What I could see now, once the price has increased, there is no way on reducing the price back. It just kept running.
I know the challenges ahead on growing a family with a tight budget, and much more impacted would be the low-income family, this made me ponder on what can the economist do to embark this issue? What could we learn? What could be the solution? Is there a hope?
Aisha saad…Finding a way to understand world much better.
