I reached a significant milestone today in finalising the payoff of the loan on my flat – nine years and a month ahead of the 30-year mortgage deadline. And I celebrate that, as I did when Donna and Dave, my parents, paid off our home in 1981, four years early.

They accomplished the early payoff by shifting their work lives starting with my high school graduation in 1975: Pops working overtime, making for a 60 hour week in the industrial spray painting shop he’d worked at since 1963, and Mom by seeking promotion from executive secretary to a next challenge and a higher pay scale as an officer at the bank where she first worked as a check proofer in 1956.

Their work-based changes were spurred on also by wanting me to go to college. With the local college student aid office notifying us that my parents’ lower middle class income status disqualified me for student loans and grants, the three of us took on extra work to cover costs of undergraduate tuition, books, gas, clothes, and daily expenses.

Education also played a role in their work toward the early mortgage payoff in 1981 rather than 1985: As my career goals shifted from joining a small newspaper staff to becoming a university-level teacher, we had to make plans for graduate school – what majors to pursue, where to enroll, and how to meet the costs.

It was always a “we” in this planning. My mom who’d been denied a college education with her father’s pronouncement that a degree would only benefit another man when she married, so tuition payments for a daughter’s education were of no value to him. Pops who wanted me to move from doing work to pay bills into work that was meaningful – to me, to them, to people I’d work with as a teacher. With the house paid for in 1981 as I began graduate school, it was as a trio that we invested in the masters and doctoral degrees that made my college teaching, and inclusive accessible pedagogy consulting possible.

I was a graduate student during an era where teaching assistantships did not cover full tuition, any health insurance costs, or make contributions to social security accounts, making it necessary for most of us to supplement our teaching stipends with second (and third) jobs as well as student loan payments to pay for the higher-than-elsewhere college town housing costs. I watched my friends of all economic backgrounds amass six-figure student loan debt even with their extra work. I managed to graduate with student loan debt under $20,000 across a last undergraduate year to a final doctoral year to write my dissertation. More accurately, Donna, Dave, and I – the three of us, the “we” – managed to keep my student debt astoundingly low.

This is how two working-class kids who became lower middle class workers created generational wealth for their child: college degrees that would let me gain intellectually and economically meaningful work, and a low-end college debt that I could pay off alongside saving for the down payment that would let me have a home of my own. Well, that last part only because I’d also learned from them that sometimes you need to take on extra work for your plans and dreams to work out. During the first five years of my full time university position, I also taught two courses overload each term and took on two or three weekly shifts at an independent feminist bookstore to save that down payment money.

In 2002 I bought my flat on a 30 year mortgage that Mom helped me navigate, and that was extended by two years with a lower interest refinance.

In 2005 I sold my parents’ house, our home from 1958 to 2005 – in part thanks to the upstairs room renters for the first seven years actually generating the cash for house payments. At the advice of my remaining aunts and uncles, I put the estate money into a Roth IRA so that I could travel, and maintain – even improve – my flat.

Today I made a $40,000-something mortgage payoff. In skipping the final years of interest payments, and using a share of the non-taxable funds remaining from the sale of “our” house, I eliminated mortgage interest costs and taxable income levies that would have come to half of the closing amount.

This, too, is generational wealth. This, too, my parents made possible via all the ways they invested in my life.