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Do We Have More Expenses Than Our Parents Did?

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At Surviving and Thriving,  a reader named Grace posted an interesting comment on Donna Freedman’s latest gracefully written post about generosity and about keeping perspective on one’s own problems.

Perspective is such an important thing, and one that we so often lose in the face of our personal woes. While I am quick to whine about my financial state, I do try to keep in mind that my parents reared their children, bought a home and had a satisfying retirement on far less than I make. Naturally, they didn’t have my expenses, but truth to tell, I shouldn’t have my expenses!

Our parents brought up their families, paid for a home, and had an adequate retirement despite never earning much…. They didn’t have our expenses, but…maybe we indulge ourselves. Oh, God. I can’t resist:

Really? Is that so?

My parents rented all the time that my father was working — partly because we lived overseas for ten years, and partly because my father felt mortgage interest was the biggest rip-off known to humankind. When my father retired, he bought a house in Sun City with cash.

The house my parents retired to would sell for about $71,000 today. In 2004, it sold for $110,000, considerably less than Zillow thinks it was worth at the height of the bubble, in 2005.

My parents bought that house in 1962. Let’s go with the $71,000 figure as the value of the house, although, relatively speaking, it may have been somewhat higher when the place was brand-new. In 1962 dollars, that price would be $9,235.  In 1960, the average price of a Sun City house was about $10,550 — and my parents’ house was one of the smaller models.

I think my father earned about $8,000 to $10,000 a year as a Merchant Marine deck officer with a license to sail any tonnage on any ocean. That translates to about $61,500 to $76,880 in 2013 dollars. And it’s probably low: today a tanker captain with an unlimited license earns between $120,000 and $200,000. However, toward the end of his career my father sailed, by choice, as first mate, because the job didn’t entail 24–7 responsibility for the ship’s operation and safety.  So, the lower figures are probably accurate. My mother occasionally took office jobs, but she wasn’t paid much — in today’s dollars, probably no more than about 18 grand. By the time my father retired, purchased a new car, and put me through college, he had about $130,000 left in savings; that would come to about $999,400 in today’s dollars.

If that estimate is anywhere near accurate, he was doing a great deal better than his daughter is doing.

Is it true that they didn’t have our expenses?

Well, my father paid for my tuition, room, and board at the University of Arizona. He gave me $1,000 a year to cover all my bills for the nine-month academic period. That’s the equivalent, in 2013 bucks, of $7,868. I paid the tuition and dorm bills, budgeted $10 a week for all my meals, clothing, laundry, and other incidental expenses, and, at the end of spring semester, came out about even. Today, if you lived on campus, it would cost you about $24,744 to attend the UofA.

So: check! There’s an expense he didn’t have.

The four-door Ford Galaxie he bought cost $2,500: about $19,980 in today’s dollars. Not much difference there: that’s what I have budgeted for the purchase of my next vehicle.

In 1962, the cost of gasoline was about 25 to 30 cents a gallon: $1.92 to $2.31 in 2013 dollars: about 2/3 of what we pay today, adjusted for inflation. Some savings there, but not as much as one might have expected.

A Porterhouse steak cost $1.19 a pound; hamburger was 45 cents a pound; butter, 67 cents a pound; baby food, 25 cents for three jars; carrots, 9 cents a bunch; asparagus, 19 cents a pound; potatoes, 39 cents for 10 pounds; corn, 5 cents an ear; onions,  29 cents for 2 pounds;  oranges, 89 cents for two dozen; bananas, 10 cents a pound; bacon, 79 cents a pound; Crest toothpaste, 50 cents a tube; Tide laundry soap, 59 cents.

How much would that market basket cost us today, if we paid the same amount in inflation-adjusted dollars?

• Porterhouse steak: $9.15 a pound (= $1.19 expressed in 2013 dollars) (Safeway has Porterhouse for $5.99 a pound just now)
• hamburger: $3.46 a pound (Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates average price of $3.055/pound for 100% ground beef in 2013)
• butter:  $5.15 a pound (BLS estimates $3.37/pound in 2012)
• baby food: $1.92 for three jars (at Walmart, 98 cents for two; that’s $1.47 for three)
• carrots: 69 cents a bunch (BLS estimate: 55 cents a pound, which would probably be about $1.10 a bunch)
• asparagus: $1.46 a pound (on sale at Safeway in 2011 for $1.28 a pound)
• potatoes: $3 for 10 pounds (in 2011, the federal government estimated you’d pay about $6.50)
• corn: 38 cents an ear (in 2012, $1 for 6 ears at Safeway; 17 cents an ear)
• onions: $2.23 for two pounds — about $1.12 a pound (last week I bought onions at Safeway for 88 cents a pound)
• oranges: $6.84 for two dozen (today’s price: 88 cents a pound; for 24 that would probably be about $10.55)
• bananas: 77 cents a pound (55 cents a pound, Safeway)
• bacon: $6.07 a pound (BLS estimate, 2013: $5.23 a pound)
• Crest toothpaste: $3.84 per tube ($3.67 at Kroger; $1.67 with a coupon)
• Tide laundry soap: $4.54, unknown quantity (2013 price: Costco, $17.49 for 170 ounces, high efficiency)

Let’s compare. In the comparison, though, let’s drop the laundry detergent, since we don’t know how much that inflation-adjusted $4.54 bought and since the new HE version would wash many more loads than 1962’s Tide would.

What would they have paid, in the same dollars we use, for their products, and what are we actually paying for those products today:

1962 vs 2013 prices

I swear: I’m not making this up!

If you express the amounts they paid in 2013 dollars and then compare what you and I would pay for the same products today, the total is…just about the same!

So no. Their day-to-day expenses were not a lot less than ours.

What about utilities?

Well, the average residential cost of electricity in 1965 was 2 cents per kilowatt-hour; adjusted for inflation, that figure would come to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour. In 2010, the average cost for residential users was 11.53 cents per kilowatt-hour. No bargain for our parents there.

Most homes had no air-conditioning, although we did have swamp coolers and window air-conditioners, which, like heating systems, were inefficient and expensive to run. And of course no one had ever heard of a DSL connection.

Average cost for cable TV: about $50 a month; in 1962 dollars, this would have been $6.50. But it’s moot: there was no cable TV in 1962 — television viewing was free. There was less advertising, too, we might add.

After much Google and Yahoo searching, I haven’t found a reliable figure for the base monthly cost of a residential land line in the 1960s. Today’s basic cost for cell phone service of $30 to $50 compares favorably with the  $45 landline cost claimed by Wiki Answers (there were no cell phones, of course), except…$45 would equate to $331 today, plus you had to pay extra for toll calls. Highly unlikely. If memory serves, I think the base residential cost was $8 or $10 a month, but any call to another area code, including one just a few miles away, would result in a long-distance charge, which could be pretty expensive. When we lived in San Francisco, my mother had to pay long-distance charges to call her grandmother in Berkeley, a 20-minute drive across the Bay Bridge. Assuming you rarely made toll calls, though, a $10 bill of 1962 would be $76.88 today — about what I pay Cox for a DSL connection and a landline.

If we moderns dispense with the land line, we can get cell service for a much more modest rate. We’ll have to pay for the phone itself — but that’s a one-time hit. And besides…the “phone” is not really a phone: it’s a tiny computer connected to the airwaves.

In 1968, a 23-inch color console TV cost $349; a quick conversion indicates this was the equivalent of $2,328. A 60-inch high-definition flat-screen color TV will set you back only 980 of today’s dollars at Costco. And you won’t have to deal with the recurring visits by the repairman that we enjoyed during the 60s.

The average salary from which our parents paid costs that were the same as or higher than the prices we’re paying today was $4,659 in 1965 — $31,082 in today’s dollars — and most households had only one salary: the man’s. Today’s intact families usually have two earners. In 2012 the average starting salary for new college grads (those who could get jobs…) was $44,259. For all earners, the average salary in 2011 was $42,980. But bear in mind: in many households today, two adults are working. In 2012, the average U.S. household income was $63,091 — twice what a typical married couple in my father’s generation could expect.

Think of that. They were paying the same or higher costs — sometimes much higher — for the same products and services we buy. But in many cases those products and services, such as automobiles that were unsafe at any speed and clunky hard-wired phones with extra fees for long distance and TV sets prone to snow, static, and spinning images, were decidedly inferior to ours. Overall the cost of living was not a heckuva lot less, when the monetary units consumers paid with are inflation-adjusted.

• Did our parents make far less than we do? Yep. In general.

• Did they have fewer expenses than we do? Not exactly.

• Should we have our expenses? Well, sure we should. Most of them buy the same services and products our parents had, only better in quality and lower in real cost. The only indulgence I can see in the expenses shown above is cable television — and many American TV fans have canceled that in favor of cheaper, less wasteful entertainment such as Netflix.

Maybe there’s a reason we live in bigger houses than our parents did, collect electronic gadgetry that would have been science fiction to them, and park two or three cars in the garage: we can afford them.


 

MORE Perp Hassle!

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F’crying out loud, the ba*tards have sent me ANOTHER pair of subpoenas! Now they want me to show up in court at 8:00 a.m. on the 25th to testify about events of which I know nothing. Four days ago, they told me our hoodlums’ trial was vacated. Now it’s back on.

They’ve dropped the burglary charge, eliminating the only topic about which I can testify, and even in that event, I have little to say, because I never saw Mr. Avery‘s face — only the back of his head as the cops were dragging him, bruised and battered, to the paddy wagon. The other one, Mr. Mejia, never came anywhere near my house or me, as far as I know.

They have sent me eleven subpoenas! Each one threatens, alarmingly, to put me in jail if I don’t show up downtown to have my time pointlessly consumed.

They’re going after these two clowns for three counts (each) of armed robbery and nine counts of kidnapping and aggravated assault. I was not present when they stuck up the pawn shop, and, unless the county attorney’s office thinks cowering in some old lady’s garage is the same as kidnapping and assaulting her, I was not present at whatever happened to evince those charges.

This is starting to feel like more than a nuisance. Each of these subpoenas, one of which was delivered in person by a sheriff’s deputy, comes with an explicit threat to throw me in jail. Every one of them demands that I cancel whatever I have scheduled on the many days when they’ve called upon me to spend an unknown amount of time in a courtroom for no discernible useful purpose. If they drag me down there next week and the proceedings last more than a day, then it will interfere with a doctor’s appointment for the very painful condition I’ve been wrestling with for the past year. Assuming it’s once again continued, next month I’m supposed to go on a hike up the West Fork of Oak Creek, a one-time opportunity (also assuming I can walk that far by then…); I may have to cancel the trip if I get a subpoena for a day or two beforehand.

I guess whenever the sun comes up this morning, I’d better to call down to my ex-husband’s office and see if I can hire a lawyer to bring a stop to this.

Like I have nothing else to spend $200 an hour on…

Counting Our Blessings…with a Grain of Salt

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OldBeggar1Over at Blue-Collar Workman, TB was listening to a relative bellyaching when he happened to glance out a window and see someone begging on the street. This led him to reflect that most people’s complaints can look mighty petty when compared to real problems, like homelessness, unemployment, and poverty.

It’s true we should count our blessings, and that whatever problem we have, someone else has a worse one.

I’m skeptical about folks begging on the street corners, though. Two reasons:

1) A police officer who surfaced in one of my classes advised that one should never give street-corner beggars money, because most of them are drug addicts seeking cash to buy more dope. She also said they often have an organized system for allocating the most profitable corners — her description of this was pretty eye-opening.

2) Consider how much you could make if you parked yourself at the right corner or haunted the right parking lot. Twenty bucks an hour, maybe? That’s more than some of us earn on the job. If you’ve got welfare and food stamps, $20 to $50 a day, tax-free, would make for some decent pocket change; $20 an hour — unreported — would provide  you with a decent living, especially when combined with government benefits.

For a panhandler to make $20, only two people would need to hand him a ten; only four would need to give him a fiver. And some people, you can be sure, do fork over a $20 bill — because, after all, that’s what comes out of the ATM.

There’s a guy who takes up a post outside the local Safeway, a would-be busker. He sets out a hat and plays the saxophone. Safeway employees chased him off the parking lot, so he does business on the sidewalk at the entry to the lot. Problem is, the guy can’t play. So his serenades consist mostly of ear-splitting sour notes. It sounds like an eight-year-old’s practice session. He’s a friendly sort, though, and will chat amicably with you if you say hello. A lot of customers go out of their way to carry hand-outs over to him.

It’s hard to know how much panhandlers actually earn, for obvious reasons. One sociological study suggested that beggars in Toronto made about $300 a month, although the authors admitted their subjects may have been low-end earners, in contrast with a Toronto journalist who, for an investigative story, lived on the streets and reported earning $200 a day.

Tales of middle-class and better income from panhandling are highly anecdotal. The Huffington Post, the Internet’s answer to The National Enquirer, once reported that a guy in Oklahoma City was earning $60,000 a year at panhandling. More credible is a study done by Coos Bay, Oregon, police showing that panhandlers outside a local Walmart were earning $300 a day — as much as the employees inside the store earned in an entire week.

Overall, though, apparently it’s not a high-income endeavor. In the first place, even if you did earn, say, $200 or $300 in a day, income would be sporadic, at best. And it’s unlikely your average panhandler sticks at the job eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year. Too, while many panhandlers are not homeless, most have substance abuse problems or untreated mental health issues.

Experts on homelessness and poverty recommend donating your money to organizations that feed, clothe, and house the homeless rather than forking over spare change to street-corner beggars. Of course this doesn’t help people who don’t want to stay in homeless shelters, for any number of excellent reasons. But at least it doesn’t transport your cash straight to some junkie’s drug dealer.

How do you respond to panhandling? Do you give money to people asking for a handout? Have you ever thought about  panhandling yourself?

Image: The Old Beggar. Louis Dewis, 1916; painted just outside his clothing store in Bordeaux. Public Domain.

 

Queen of the Universe in Action

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The Human, also known as lady-in-waiting to the Queen of the Universe, is whipped. What a day!

P1020085Did you notice that the Queen hit the big time? Yes. Hufflepup, newest entry in the Cuteness Derby, was amused by her Majesty’s habit of ordering the lady-in-waiting around. So, if Her Majesty needed a moment of fame, now she has one.

The Queen approves Hufflepup’s attempts to train his own Human, who apparently is even more refactory than the lady-in-waiting. Gawdawful amount of work, these humans, aren’t they?

This afternoon her Queenship deigned to bathe, the weather having reached an acceptable 80 degrees. The Royal Bath is always quite a production, involving the human trying to soap and rinse the Queen and the Queen taking off like a rocket. The Queen has an allergy to water.

Luckily, I learned a few handy clues from this video illustrating the grooming of another member of the corgi aristocracy.

First, I nabbed the idea of giving her a preliminary spray of diluted hair conditioner (don’t be fooled: conditioner is conditioner is conditioner, doesn’t matter whether it’s dog or human). As suggested, let it sit on her coat for 20 minutes before pouncing her for The Bath.

Then, I really like the idea of scrubbing her, without wetting her down, using a wet sponge with a dab of shampoo. This worked very well, with a lot less doggy trauma than soaking her in the hose and scrubbing her with large squirts of soap.

This was an easy way to clean fur in general and desperately filthy spots in specific, and it worked without disturbing her noticeably.

That meant the only real moment of terror for Her Majesty came when I had to rinse her off in the hose. First I poured a half-gallon of vinegar water over her soaped fur, which helped, in our hard water, to speed the horrible rinsing process. The result: it didn’t take long to rinse out the shampoo.

P1020091The Queen’s fur looks very lovely: fluffy and bright white (as appropriate) and rich brown and frightfully clean. And damp…she takes forever to dry. Blow-drying her this afternoon took some of the water out, but as usual it’s required a full day for her to come back to about normal.

Spent two hours at physical therapy this morning. While the boss was away, the mice decided to play: an excellent new employee decided to focus on whatever the hell ails me. She showed me a bunch of new exercises and worked on the endlessly painful hips, which seemed to help a lot.

Wrestling with the Queen didn’t help to preserve that improvement, alas. And there there was the fact that I haven’t cleaned in three weeks and so was reduced to vacuuming, dust-mopping, and steam-mopping 1860 square feet of tile this afternoon. This, after a bookkeeping frolic and a file-updating frenzy.

Since I worked until 2 this morning, I started out tired. And now am very, very tired.

And so, to bed…

 

w00t! Vacated!!

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So this morning I get back on the phone to the county attorney’s office. First the woman I reach can’t find the cases…turns out she hit a wrong numeral in her search. Then we discover the perps have got NEW case numbers. She succeeds in tracking down all four case numbers…and, it develops, they’ve been vacated!

“Soooo,” say I, ever suspicious, “what does that mean?”

“Well,” says she, “probably they took a plea deal.”

“So I don’t have to show up at all?”

“Nope!”

Hooo-rah!

“Thank you very much,” I say. “And if there’s anything I can do to help out if needed, let me know,”

“Bake us some cookies?” she says. “Just kidding!”

🙂

How to Be a “Victim”

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As you may recall, after the late, great garage invasion Sheriff Joe and the county prosecutor’s office declared me a “victim” of a couple of gang-banging thugs. The county has an involved victim assistance program, supposedly designed to reassure, protect, and aid victims of crimes.

Yeah.

Beginning way back in November, Sheriff Arpaio’s office started issuing subpoenas — consistently sent to the wrong address, despite repeated corrections from me — demanding that I show up at the trial of one or the other of these two guys. He even sent a deputy to my door to serve one of these papers, all of which inform me that if  I’m not there at 8 in the morning on thus-and-such a day, I will be jailed, and that I have to sit there until a judge dismisses me. Each one has to be answered, by return mail, in the affirmative, to the effect that yes, I have received the latest piece of paper and yes, I promise to show up there, and yes, I know I will be thrown in jail if I don’t show up. I’ve probably received about a dozen of these, partly because they send two or three at a time and partly because the trial has repeatedly been postponed.

It looks like the trial is finally going to happen this Wednesday.

At this point, they’re trying two of the thugs…interestingly, last fall they said one of them had copped a plea. So why we’re having to jump through double hoops is unclear. But that’s far from the most ridiculous aspect of the interminable series of subpoenas.

Silliest aspect? I can’t even begin to identify either of these characters.

One never came anywhere near me or my house, and so I’ve never seen him in my life. The other hunkered down in my garage, on the other side of a dead-bolted door. Two dead-bolted doors, actually, since I locked myself inside my office when it became clear the gent was out there. The only glimpse I got of him was of the back of his head, seen from way across the street as they dragged the guy, kicking and biting, to the paddy wagon.

The only help I can give the prosecutor is to say whether the shirt, the rubber gardening shoes, and an old straw hat that he used to try to disguise himself as a lawn man actually belong to me. This identification could easily be done with a deposition, without dragging me into the courtroom and without exposing me to the attention of the two thugs’ fellow gang-bangers. And without making it obvious, in public, that I live here alone.

The subpoenas punctiliously delete the “victim’s” address. As though they didn’t already know where I live! Hey, folks…they were here. And the night after our boy was released from jail, he came back to retrieve his gun from my back yard — he left the back gate hanging open as a calling card.

Try as I might, I cannot get a straight story from the prosecutor’s office as to how much of my time this fiasco is going to consume. Am I going to be down at the court all day Wednesday? Can I expect this will go on for several days? How much is it going to cost me to park my car downtown all day long? Can I bring a computer so I can do some work while I’m killing time down there? Will they let me take a computer into the courtroom?

I’m supposed to give a presentation at 7:30 on Thursday morning. And since I’m standing in for the group’s president while he recovers from bypass surgery, I have to be there with the organization’s checkbook so as to pay for the Thursday breakfast.

At this point, I have no idea whether I’ll be able to do that or not.

It’s better than last November’s subpoena, which would have had me docked for at least a day of teaching pay — and since my classes met twice a week, that would have meant loss of a fourth of a two-week paycheck. But it’s still a nuisance.

Today I’m going to call the prosecutor’s office again — they’re very nice people; they just don’ t know anything — and if I can’t get a straight story, I guess I’ll have to cancel the presentation and try to get one of the other group members to emcee the meeting and pay for breakfast.

I’m starting to lose patience with this. It’s gone on and on, and it shows some potential to put me at risk, since you can be sure anything I say about either one of the two sh!theads, even “yes, that’s my shirt,” is not going to be appreciated by his fellow sh!theads. And whether they care about their pal or not, they will now know I’m an elderly woman who lives alone, making me a prime target for burglary and possibly other mayhem.

Obviously, the prosecutor’s office needs to get crime victims and witnesses to show up at the courtroom to testify against perps. And that’s fine — I’m happy to be present and to help out to the extent that I can. The issue here is that I can’t help much, or possibly even at all. And the endless badgering from the sheriff’s office has begun to annoy. I’m tired of the threats. And really, I’d like to get a straight story about how much of my time will be absorbed by this — that shouldn’t be too much to ask.

It’s beginning to feel like victimizing the victim. I’m not looking forward to whatever happens next…