POV: You Started Thinking Like Old Money — Everything Changed

«At twenty-three you were writing estimates for people who folded them up and never called. Then a woman in a cardigan with a hand-sewn elbow patch wrote a check for thirty-one thousand dollars for a slate roof, standing in a kitchen from nineteen seventy-four that she had no intention of touching. New money buys the view, she told you. Old money buys the roof. Eighteen years later your accounts hold one million forty thousand dollars, the house is paid off, and your friend Wes still thinks you never quite got going. Nobody has ever complimented your roof. Is there something in your life you have quietly kept up for years that nobody has ever noticed? Tell me about it in the comments.»