<prompt> Human: A mentor of mine whom I will refer to as Bob was telling me about another person with whom he has been working on some financial issues. Ill call this other person Dave. According to Bob, Dave has an income of around 150,000.00, several children 4 I think, a large home in the suburbs with two mortgages, a couple of very nice cars leased, a house full of furniture and gadgets, and a whole bunch of toys. When asked Dave admits he has no retirement savings IRA, 401k, etc..., no rainy day savings, no 529 plans for his children, and two mortgages on his home.When Bob lectured Dave about the wisdom of living within your means and putting something away for the future, Dave responded that he WAS living within his means because he was able to afford the payments to finance all the stuff he had. Dave went on to tell Bob that Bob just doesnt understand because it is a generational thing. Bob is in his 60s. Dave is in his late 30s or early 40s.Heres my question:How old are the people here on personal finance?Most of you seem to think like Bob. Is it really a generational thing or is it a cultural thing?  <response>: I think asking rpersonalfinance is going to give you very skewed answers. The subscribers here are a subset of Reddit which skews young and male who are already interested in personal finance therefore more likely to be financially literate. The result will be a bunch of people who are younger than average and more financially astute than average. And everyone can cherry pick their favorite examples of relativesfriends who arearent the same.If anything, I think Dave is an exception to the generational stereotype. The younger generation has much easier access to credit than our parentsgrandparents had and no direct experience with the Great Depression. When I think of the people I know and how they deal with moneydebt, their behavior and philosophy has much more to do with how much they were coddled. Those who had to work hard for their own money, were more responsible. Those who had parentsspouses who took care of everything, were not. I see opposing dynamics in the same generation within a family, so I dont believe its an age thing at all. 