or 7.64 in today's money.

Today it would be 25,000 if I was making that. I make a total (all pensions, salary, Interest on investments, etc) of 158,000 today. I was very low paid in 1987.

Not too shabby.

It gives my cumulative inflation at around 100%. Well, that is bull. Rent is triple, gas is quadruple, utilities are more than double, food - who knows, it is much higher.

1989 - $3.85
2014 - $7.36
Perc - 91.2%

I tries to get at the kinds of things I'm constantly harping on: The expectation of having a cell phone and a computer and cable and an HD TV, and so on. Whether or not you consider those things necessities today, the fact is that our current minimum standard of living includes a lot of things that none of us had thirty or more years ago.

I've read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books any number of times, and each time I take away some different insight. One of the times I read through them I noticed how very little cash it took for that family to maintain itself. Now, we need a remarkable amount of cash to maintain what most of us consider a basic standard of living. Yes, it's possible to do with less: Not own a computer and go to the library to get on line. Not own a car and take public transportation. Not have cable or satellite or any such service and only watch broadcast TV. Get all the books you read or DVDs you watch from the library. But even when you do those things (and I do some of those) our expectation of what will be available to us is vastly different from what it was not all that long ago.

If you go back more than a couple of decades, given the immense increase in various things along the lines of consumer electronics, it becomes tricky at best to compare standards of living. And to go back more than fifty or sixty years becomes almost impossible. Those of us who are old enough (I'm 65) can recall so many differences in how we lived then as compared to now.

Here's one trivial example: I can recall my mother going around to several different places in the 1950's to pay various bills. They must have been things like utilities. I suppose she had a checking account, but back then she was paying those bills in cash. It was later on, in the 1960's that mailing checks to pay such things became common. And even then it was possible to pay certain utilities at the bank. Given that I was a child then, I may have some of this wrong. I do know that by the time I was living on my own, in 1966, I paid the very few bills I had with a check. Now, I pay almost everything electronically. But that ability to pay electronically is relatively recent. Some of my bills I don't even fool with; they are automatically deducted from my checking account every month. That makes my life infinitely easier, especially when I travel and I'm not home to get bills and make sure they are paid.

when they realize that most people in the 1700s didn't have closets for their clothes - hooks on the wall, a single chest, or a small wardrobe would more than accommodate everything from their small-clothes to their single pair of shoes. I usually use that example as an introduction to the idea of how "worth" has changed over time.

They love Measuring Worth - I had a student one semester who chose a comparison of historic commodity values for his research paper because of the information it provides. It gave him a terrific jumping off place to discuss how society changed between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

I agree with you that things have really, really changed. Yearly, I have to remind myself that my students have simply not experienced so many things; making analogies is getting harder and harder, frankly!

It leaves out anything considered "volatile." like gas and food. Not sure if rent is included. Still, it's really hard to find anything other than the official rate online.

Note that any wage after 1980 has a far, far lower multiplier than wages before that watershed year. Yes, I'm blaming Reagan.

or $25K/year full-time. That's $2.15 in 1972

I had in 1964 equals $2,676 per month now?

My college tuition at University of Houston was $50 a semester plus another couple hundred for books, so this is how I was able to pay for a whole year of school with three months of summer work.

--accumulating massive amounts of debt.

made $1.25 per hour, or $9.15 in today's money.

It was farily easy for teens to find work in those days, so they had to be competitive. I'm betting that there was a lot of variation, as each seed company had its own bus of kids.

for $1.80/hour.

My nephew is 'pollinating' corn, they don't simply detassle the corn anymore, and he makes $12.00/hour for about six weeks.

clerk typist for McDonnell Douglas

Fifty cents an hour.... at a hardware store.

$4.32 in today's dollars.

Man.... that's really minimum wage.

I operated a cash register, stocked, and helped re-roof the lumber shed that first summer. Kept the job until I was 15.

Legal...? I wasn't a lawyer.

$4.32 in today's money.

The job actually paid $2.90, but I got an extra dime an hour for swing shift differential.

is that what we typically buy today is somewhat different from what we bought some years ago.

In 1966 I had a job that paid the then minimum wage, $1.25/hour. I actually supported myself on that, but just barely. It covered my rent in a crappy place, and fortunately the rent included utilities; I had no phone, no TV. I could buy groceries, but it was tight. I had no car and walked to work. I was only 18 years old and just starting out, so I was willing to live at the very edge. It was not possible to save at all.

Now everyone expects to have a phone of some kind, a TV, cable, internet, a computer, and so on. All of those things add to the bottom line of the standard of living in a way that did not exist fifty years ago.

My point is that we Boomers, when starting out, expected a whole let less materially than is considered normal these days. Back then many of us lived with roommates, something young people today find quite shocking. We simply did without a lot that people expect to have now. We also did not have credit cards when we were starting out.

What is also true is that things like college were vastly less expensive. A few years ago I explained to my son that when I first went off to college in 1965, a summer job at minimum wage, if you lived at home and saved most of it, would give you enough money to pay tuition and fees at many public universities. You'd have to live at home while attending school, but that wasn't so bad. It was possible to graduate college with no debt, something almost unheard of anymore.

But then, over the years it's been put out that everyone needs to go to college, and that it's okay (and frighteningly easy) to borrow money to do so. In the 1960's there weren't very many community colleges, which is what I happily encourage young people to start out in. The kinds of blue collar jobs that used to provide a good living have largely disappeared, but the community colleges have all sorts of degree programs that lead directly to decent jobs. Don't major in something that doesn't have good job prospects, not these days. Back when I was first going off to college, a simple college degree, no matter what the major, was good enough to get a decent white-collar job, especially if you were male. And white. Now, you have to think very carefully about what you want to spend your life doing.

I can recall all too well when we Boomers were first entering the job market, and our elders complained bitterly that we had no work ethic, were lazy and unreliable, and how hard it was to get a job with no experience. Which is why I get furious at my age mates who complain the same way about young entry level workers today. We all improve with age.

In most cases, we cannot live without internet, simply because society demands it. Job ads, networking, job applications - most of that is done over the internet these days. We cannot expect to be taken seriously in our job searches if we haven't researched the company which we are applying to, and a hand-written application will be tossed in the trash. Internet in most cases means cable - and perhaps we should plug entertainment prices (cinema tickets etc) to see that price differential, too.

Most young people are NOT shocked at having to live with roommates - most young people (and many older young people) live with roommates because there's no chance they can afford to live alone.

A credit card is a necessity today - not only do you have to have one to build your credit score, but society expects you to have one. Just as it expects you to have a college degree - and if you have trouble finding jobs, that is because you chose the wrong degree, not because the job market is screwed up.

I do see that you acknowledge that today's 20somethings do have it harder than your generation, but still, there were some parts of your post that just didn't sit well with me. Today, repuke values saturate society, and tells young people that if things go wrong for them, it is their own fault. The society the Boomers grew up in was so "easy" (relatively speaking, compared to today) that they learned that the only way to fail was because of personal ineptitude. However, many of them are incapable of seeing society as it is for young people, and blame them personally for any failures, when in reality, many 20somethings are damned any which way they turn. For many of them, there simply isn't any way to win - the US is one of the least socially mobile countries in the Western world. And this society wasn't created by young people, it was created by those who today are in their 50s, 60s and more.

I'm not suggesting doing without internet and such, but those things absolutely add considerably to what is needed for today's society. Which is one of the reasons that the current minimum wage is so inadequate.

As an aside, in one recent re-reading of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books I was struck by how very little cash they needed to survive. Now, we need a remarkable amount of cash for the very basics.

I am not one who thinks that someone isn't in poverty just because they have certain material things that third world poor people don't have.

I'm aware that many younger people, even adults, are back living at home because of economics, and it is clearly my lack of contact with enough younger people that makes me unaware that many have roomates. I appreciate learning what is really happening.

And even though I'm all too aware of how not having a college degree is limiting, I also keep on trying to get kids and their parents to understand that vocational degrees can be a very good thing.

I can assure you that when we Boomers first entered the adult world, it was not made easy for us. Indeed, our sheer numbers made competition for jobs stiffer than you might realize. I recall all too clearly being caught in the trap of every job required experience and no one seemed willing to give any of us that first job. Obviously, at some point all (or most of us) got that first job and went on for there, but it was not as easy as it may appear in hindsight.

I agree that a credit card and building a credit score is important, but it was also important forty-five years ago. Not the credit cards themselves, because the consumer cards like Visa and Master Charge weren't quite out there yet. But what we did was get an account with a department store and build our credit that way. So the process is quite similar, just the details are different.

It's been my observation that every generation gets dumped on by their elders, with only a few exceptions. And every generation as they get older tries to protect what they have. I have been staunchly defending the younger generations for a couple of decades now, ever since I spent ten years attending classes in a junior college, always sitting next to 19 year olds. I get furious at my sister who is constantly critical of younger co-workers, as if she herself was never young.

I don't quite know what generation I belong to, as a model '75, but I do know that when people complain about the current crop of high school students, that's on me and my generation, not the high schoolers. I am old enough to be their mother, so I am part of the group that created the society they are growing up in. I refuse to believe that any generation is inherently worse than any other- same genes and whatits as the previous one, right? If their work ethic is worse than ours, it is because they have been raised that way, and who raised them? My generation, and the conditions in which we raised them were created by their grandparent generation.

In other words, anyone who complains about the younger generation should look in the mirror for the cause.

I was astonished at how many households with voters in their 40s and 50s also had voters in their 20s and 30s.

and some sort of computer set up is required for work if you went to college.

I agree the most cost effective degrees are to be had from community colleges, but they don't translate into career momentum. Since nothing else does these days, though, maybe a 2 year degree is really the way to go. It's enough to pay the bills and not enough to run up crippling debt.

While it's true we Boomers had cheesy portable record players, that was it for home entertainment. Computers were hand wired vacuum tube monstrosities that lived in their own buildings, cell phones were in comic books (Dick Tracy and his wrist radio), and even though cable was starting to appear in big cities, even our parents didn't get it for some years. If we had a TV, it was second hand, black and white, and had a wire coat hanger for an antenna.

No wonder we turned to drugs.

What a lot of kids are giving up these days are things we took for granted, like driving. The Ipod has replaced the cheap stereo at a tenth the price. Instead of going out, they socialize online or on the phone.

As for the roommate situation, I've noticed in the younger forums that most of the kids who managed to move away from their parents have them. That part hasn't changed and roommates are still insane and/or slobs. We left home like we were shot out of a cannon. They have to plan very, very carefully before they can leave home.

Each generation has a bunch of choices to make when they're just starting out and most of them are painful. It just looks like luxury to people who started out with different choices.

for delivering newspapers.

Equal to $10.65 today.

In today's dollars, that's $679.28.

Of course, your housing, food, health care, wardrobe, and life insurance were provided.

did you feel like you had a decent amount of money to spend as you wished?

Were you able to save?

That $12,000 house your parents (or grandparents) bought in the 1950s would only be worth $100,000 according to that calculator.

It's not exactly accurate, but it does show how the value of the currency has fallen into the toilet in order to give the super-rich their casino.
$1 (1920) = $1.94 (1970)
$1 (1970) = $6.11 (2014)

Remember that items like food, fuel, and housing/shelter were removed from that number to keep it "low" at $6.11.

Last edited Sun Jun 8, 2014, 12:19 PM - Edit history (1)

Within a year, I had saved enough to put a down payment on a 1968 brand new Mustang.

a 1966 Mustang.

Do you remember what it cost? What your car payment was? And were you living at home or paying for rent and such out of that paycheck?

I was still living at home. Got free lunches at work. Paid my Mom $20 for R & B. Paid for public transportation. I don't remember how much the car cost, I probably only had to put down $200/$300. Where I worked, we got salary increases every 6 months for the 1st 2 years, after that on an annual basis if you were doing a good job. I also got a couple of promotions in that time period. Started as a file clerk.

...I made a whopping .80/hr

wage in effect then?

I was glad to have a way to make some money. Didn't have a car yet, so didn't need a lot. I got paid in cash. I only worked two months before I had to go back to school. In Texas, anything in a/c was better than mowing lawns in the heat. I also had a job at 14 riding on a milk delivery truck on Saturdays. That only paid .50/hr. The delivery guy musta weighed 400 lbs and he needed a kid to run the milk up to the door and get the money. In those days, most people just hid the milk money somewhere. He'd tell me where to look for the money if it was one of those houses.
When I was in grade school, we'd walk the highways and dirt roads searching for pop bottles to redeem for .02 ea. Ten bottles got me a soda and a candy bar! We had a place that sold burgers for .30 and a milkshake was .25. You do what ya gotta do!

Ten bottles = 1 soda and a candy bar sounds just about right.
There was a hamburger joint called Mr. Quick that opened up in my town in 1971. It offered burgers for 19 cents.

Look at it this way. We've seen plenty of evidence at DU that if minimum wage had kept pace with the income increases of the top percentile (to say nothing of cost of living), it would be around 22 bucks an hour now. But using most "inflation calculators," the adjusted minimum wage from circa 1970 would be less than half that. So if I made minimum in 1970, is that equivalent to the adjusted rate now (something like nine bucks an hour), the $10.10 minimum that everyone seems to be pushing for, or the 22 bucks an hour it should be in a reasonable world? One thing is certain: even at $10.10 an hour, nobody could live as well today as he could in 1970 on $1.25 an hour.

As for my first job, it was sub-minimum flipping burgers at a Burger Chef, paid 90 cents an hour in 1972.

-- Mal

while an individual could manage to live on minimum wage if you lived in a less expensive part of the country, no one was living well on it back then.

I was in Tucson and supported myself -- just -- on a minimum wage of $1.25 in 1966. It went up to $1.40 the next year, and about six months after that I went to work for the telephone company as an information operator at $75/week. Which was pretty decent, but still pretty bare bones.

On the other hand, and what is really underlying this entire thread, is that there were more jobs out there, blue collar jobs specifically (many of which were union) that paid much better, that afforded enough money to raise a family. But by 1969 or so women were entering the workforce in large numbers. Married women with children especially. However you want to view it: greediness on the part of the worker/consumers, a decline in real wages, or what, a two income family became the norm. And the two things, the decline of those good blue collar wages and the increase of former stay-at-home women into the workforce happened hand in hand.

So if we return to those better paying blue collar jobs, are women going to go back home? I doubt it. Not only is having more money always nice, many women want the independence and security that being able to earn decent money (however we define decent) brings them, even if they are happily married to a wonderful man who will never abandon them. Or they have jobs they genuinely like, or careers that won't happen if they don't stay working.

Simply put, a lot has changed. Yes, we need a much higher minimum wage. But don't kid yourself that anyone was raising a family on minimum wage back in the 60's or 70's.

Not a life of Riley, but at least a roof over your head and food on the table. So long as you didn't have dependents and weren't too picky about cockroaches. It's not possible now, and therein lies the difference. In fact, it's not possible by a wide margin.

As I see it, the expansion of the labor pool reduced the value of labor in classical capitalistic style. People seem to ignore the fact that the glorious economy of the 50's and 60's was fuelled by a shortage of labor. That shortage was at least partially an illusion, because women and minorities were excluded from the work force for many of the better-paying jobs. This changed in the late 60's/early 70's just when the labor force was already expanding due to Boomers coming of age. Economics 001: when supply goes up, demand goes down, and that means that the capitalists were able to pay less for employees, a trend that has continued to this day. It's been a great benefit to the rich man.

-- Mal

as I did.

I bet minimum wage didn't go any farther in the big cities than it does today.

Perhaps a more significant comparison would be what percentage of people earn minimum wage now as compared to some previous date.

not bad for a 13 year old. Now it would take $10.41 per hour to equal. The millionaire club in congress needs to get off their lazy butts and raise the stinking minimum wage.

Thank you for posting this thread with the inflation calculator link. I'm tired of rolling my eyes at people bragging/complaining about how little money they made years ago when in reality they made considerably more than peons do today.

Babysitting, cooking, cleaning around 1980.

I came highly recommended (I was told this by the individual that hired me) and started at .95 per hour. Whoever gave me the recommendation must have been very disappointed. I quite after 1 or 2 weekends.

.75 per hour equals $4.39 today.

.95 per hour equals $5.56 today.

I find it hard to believe that 20 cents in 1971 was the same as $1.17 today.

I was around and working and living on my own that year. I had a wage that was decent then, but did not have the buying power that the inflation calculator would suggest. I'm struggling to recall what I was making at that point. It might have been $600/month, which would seem like a lot, but trust me, it wasn't. I could pay my rent, buy food, buy clothes, and not much more. I took public transportation to work. There was very little left over for anything else.

Maybe the entire point of this thread is that working people have always struggleed.

There was and is no minimum wage for being a farm hand.

1981, $50 - $100 a gig, $130 - $260 now. I *think* union scale was $35/hour ($91.28 now). <== could be wrong, memory is fuzzy.

First part time job at a department store, 1983, $4.25/hour = $10.12/hour now.

First full time job, in a factory, at entry level unskilled labor, 1986, $10.50/hour = $22.71/hour now.

Holy crap!!! (What non-union factory is paying unskilled workers $22.71/hour now?)

First salaried job, in I.T., 1989, $26000. $49,708 now. I think today my company hires "newbies" in I.T. at about $35K.

Wow.

I make $23.76 today and it's paycheck to paycheck pretty much, don't know how people survive at $8-$10 an hour.

nailing drywall behind the hangers of said drywall. Only job I ever hated as I love working but it was so mundane that it was hard for me to stay hooked up. I liked the money though -

Fast food job 3.65 an hour which is 9.52 today.

My mom could stay at home and raise the four kids they had, in the house they just bought.

In order for me to do what my old man did... I'd have to bring in $158,576.59

Course I'm 58 now, so if I had started a family when I was 30... $71,973.24

I was making about $20,000

$4,800 a year

and made $2.30 pumping gas = $9.58 in today's money.

Before that I hauled hay in the spring/summer @ 0.02 per bale and would make around $15.00 a day = $72.13 per day now.

It probably wasn't much. But at the time it felt like all the money in the world.

$4/hr in 1982 is a current day equivalent of $9.83.

1965 'dog & suds'...

that I could earn the equivalent of $15.22 in today's money.

My senior year of college was $2700 for tuition, room, and board, or $15,313 in today's money. Apartments were between $50 and $100 per bedroom, or $283.00 and up.

My graduate fellowship paid $300 or $1422 per month.

The last graduate school apartment I lived in (1981) cost $270 for a three-bedroom unit in a triple-decker, or $704, split three ways.

By any measure, the necessities of life are less affordable than they were then.

Minimum Wage was $1.60/hr. Most of my friends were getting that or less.

Wolf