Wealth

It’s a lovely, warm, touchy-feely thing to say that the wealthiest man is the one that has love in his life…love of family, friends, etc.

Uhm..yeah. That and fifty cents will get you a round of .223. For now.

What does wealth look like at the moment? Well, for me, it looks like this:And this:

Because of this:

Ok, its actually a bit more complicated than that….the real damage hasn’t even started to show yet. But give it time…. this time next year $100 worth of groceries is gonna be a lot less bulky and heavy than you remember it being.

 

27 thoughts on “Wealth

    • A year from now, virtually nothing about the world will be recognizable. and it will be far worse.

  1. It already is.
    When I was a kid in the late ’60’s-early ’70’s, I remember the first time my mother spent $100 + on groceries. We had just moved and she was stocking the pantry. We had 3 grocery carts overflowing.

    Once we got it all loaded in the car, there was barely room for my brother and me. All the way home, my mother was telling us, “don’t sit on the eggs”!
    “Ummm… too late, mom”.
    Now, I barely fill 3 plastic bags for the same money.

    Something is just fundamentally wrong here…..

    • True, however my parents were also make 17000 a year combined in the 70s. So, I wonder how my buying power today compares to my parents in the 70s before Carter inflation. Maybe a good future post idea Zero!!

          • $17K in the ’70s would have bought you about 4 sedans, new.
            Which would now be something north of $120K.

            So not so far off, I think.

            If we want to use gold as the standard, based on the NY and London prices, $17K in 1970 would over $800K in purchasing power now.

            Show of hands: Anybody out here making $400K/yr now?
            No?
            THAT is how much inflation has eaten your earning power in 50 years.
            You’re probably making less than a quarter of what either parent bought in, alone, no matter how many zeros they put after your salary.

            My parents were in a similar situation to 3rdMan in the ’70s, and the fact that while my salary is now 6 times theirs, prices are now up to 25 times theirs, explains why I’m not in a house I own, and probably won’t ever be, until I retire to some distant patch in BFE, build my own shack, and live as a happy hermit, and will have to hope to work much later in life than either of them did just to afford that.

          • I ran it through an online inflation calculator to get a current value of X in 1970s dollars.

          • Zero,

            you are probably closer on the mark. My dad was a cop and my mom a secretary in west Texas in the 1970s.

          • Its not a guess. There are inflation calculators online where you enter X in 1970-whenever dollars and it tells you how that stacks up in current dollars.

      • It wasn’t Carter,it was Nixon with closing the gold window (creating Pure Fiat),price and wage controls that really got LBJ’s guns+butter(cold war,Vietnam,great society)train wreck to really roll over the middle class.

  2. You really need to discover Tattler reusable canning lids and your worries about finding canning lids will be over.

    • I used Tattler lids a couple of times and had frequent failures. I know they are somewhat different to use, but the failures are frustrating. I seldom have failures with Ball/Kerr lids.

  3. I just mentioned the grocery example to my this past weekend. When I got out of the Navy in 88, I could buy a weeks worth of groceries, a pizza and a case of beer for around $40. This weekend we went to the grocery and spent close to $300 for a family of four….and I forgot to buy beer!

  4. Ahhh yup, it’s gonna get worse, and continue until this entire shitshow is nothing but a glowing ember. I’m not worried about next year bringing in $100 dollar 2 bags of groceries. Today $100 buys enough fuel to get to town and back and only 2 bags of groceries. And this economic downfall is just getting started.

  5. 100 bucks worth of groceries is already way less than even six months ago and is only getting worse. Just one recent example is Del Monte Foods announced a price increase on fresh cut fruit, bananas and pineapples. It won’t be much longer until they increase prices on their canned goods.

    Meat is already outrageous. Can hardly wait to see what happens with bread and other baked goods.

  6. Mid- 80’s I was renting an RV lot in town, in California, smoking and drinking, and eating a lot of meat and fruit with no processed foods, and it was a total of half my take home pay at minimum wage. I’m not THAT old that this what that long ago.
    *
    One effect coming soon of the failing economy and the crash of empire will be the end of our manipulation of the precious metals paper market. Now add in commodity metal ore extraction slow downs ( 50% of the silver supply ). If you are planning on buying silver, it won’t last too much longer at affordable prices.
    *
    A possible canning alternative is dehydrating. Here’s one video ( she makes a lot of good video’s ):
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhwiQrP9S4w
    *
    She uses canning jars to store the food, but that is because she dislikes plastic. I use plastic to store my dehydrated foods, no problem. Just a thought. I kept hearing a lot of bad reviews on the reuseable lids. Not saying its true, just that I waited too long so canning is not really a great option now.

    • As I said above, I have almost no failures with Tattler lids. The secret is, you MUST retighten them immediately after you remove them from the canner while they are still hot. Put on two hot mitts and twist away.

  7. There are a series of booklets titled “If you were Born in 1959 (for example)” and it talks about events, movies and MOST IMPORTANT talks about minimum wage, average wage, cost of a gallon of milk, gallon of gasoline and so on.

    There is a Noticeable ratio between paycheck and min wage Vs COST OF EVERYTHING.

    Guess what? Basics unless SCARCE cost about the same ratio of the average paycheck year after year.

    Simple description of Inflation “Too many Dollars chasing the SAME LOAF of Bread (Or Gallon of Gasoline etc.)”.

    Hyperinflation “When the Government tries to HELP you with even MOAR Debt and Free Shit”.

    Short US Dollars, LONG Useful Tangibles like Food and such. Going to get weird out here until the dollar finally stinks too much like a rotting fish (Rots from the HEAD down Mr. Gov Agent) and folks find out that Printing Fake Money doesn’t “Create Loaves of BREAD to eat.

  8. Two issues with the whole “cost then v. Cost now”:
    1) Gold prices were fixed, not floating, in 1970. Not a fair comparison.
    2) I understand what the poster means when he says he could buy 4sedans with a years wages in 1970, but that’s an imprecise measurement. Four Datsuns or four Mercedes?

    The thing that’s been driving me nuts lately is this:
    When I was sixteen years old, I could buy a 2-liter bottle of Coke for $0.99. Fourty years later I walk into my grocery store and Coke is on sale for…… $0.99!

    Am I just getting a screaming deal today or was I being grossly overcharged fourty years ago?

    • Look at the ingredients,pure US cane sugar vs deadly high fructose corn syrup. Remember when old Coke was eliminated for New Coke? They were never able to go back. Try a Mexican Coke,never used corn syrup,different product.

  9. “Fifty cents will get you a round of .223” giving the price it’s been going for can we take it your talking about Wolf Steel?

Comments are closed.