Definitely way off. Raised by a single teenaged mom and a mentally ill grandmother and I grew up south of Detroit in the 70s and 80s. I am about to turn 49 and when I graduate this spring and will be the first in my family to have done so.

So, funding can happen like this: during my vagabond years prior to parenthood I worked cannabis harvests every year - you can make a pretty fat wad of cash if you do it right, and if you then go to a place that's cheap (rural Mexico, for example) and you stay living cheap and keep working - at the hostel, making stuff and selling it, waiting tables or bartending - you can go indefinitely. Hitchhiking, car camping if I had a vehicle, WWOOFING - all sorts of ways to do it.