I'm 5 years younger, give or take. Husband and I have been toying with that idea more and more. Liquidate it all, and buy an RV to travel in, and be happy checked out nomads.

We don't own a house, the absolute lowest rent we can find (within a 20 mile radius of our business) is $2600 a month (1 bed/1 bath), and every year Greystar and their cronies raise the rent significantly. The apartment we are in now is currently listed for right around $3k. It was up around $3200 about a month ago. It's a fucking 1 bedroom.

Food gets more and more expensive. Insurance for everything is easily $1k a month. All the "utilities" just keep going up and up, and being in San Diego, SDGE just keeps bending us over further and further. We pay more for electricity than anyone else in the country, last I heard. Fucking why?! Car payments, and petrol is hovering right around $5.50-$6 per gallon now. We never eat out because it's inevitably over $50, and sucks.

When I graduated high school, a house was somewhere in the $250k to $300k range, in an ok area, but far from most stuff (yay urban sprawl) with interest rates being over 7%. Ok. cool, in todays money that would be solid, but back then, I made less than $9 an hour. Then we had how many "once in a lifetime" financial crisis in the span of what 10 years, right after I got out of school.

Owning a business gets harder and harder each year, and more and more expensive. City and county both keep making up new shit to charge a $300 fee here, a $400 fee there, another $250 fee there. Plus, hacking, banks, and the rest of the shit going wrong, we just had $4k stolen from our payment account, and Intuit (the fucking devil, only behind nestle) just shrug their shoulders, say they aren't a bank, and to get fucked. I just don't want to do any of it anymore.

I also don't have family to help me, so I've always been on my own. Your kids are VERY, unbelievably lucky. I have asked my mother for help once in my adult lifetime, and I was told I didn't deserve it, and I got myself in the position, so I needed to figure it out myself.

I didn't mean for this to turn into a whine fest. But to answer the original question, no, I don't. I did the right things, I started a business to better my life, and while I'd say we are squarely middle class, but what I was promised as a kid absolutely does NOT line up with reality.