That is weird, isn’t it? IIRC, the formula was Annual Income x 2.5 = Maximum Housing Cost.
It was a fine little house – 3 BR, LR, DR, updated kitchen, enclosed porch, one bathroom, detached garage, large corner lot – but it was next to the railroad tracks and had sat empty for a couple of years.
Maybe it was an anomaly, but maybe not. When they moved to Seattle in 1964, they bought a house for $7K in the Greenwood district. It sold in 2002 for $180K and is assessed now at $300K. My stepdad did know how to find a bargain!
Okay by me. Here’s a sitethat compares three items: median household income, new housing price and gasoline price from 1960 through 2006.
Fine, smart guy. I only mentioned it to show that my father wouldn’t actually spend money for a good hi-fi, but he did think a second TV “for the kids” was worth it. OTOH, he wouldn’t buy a color TV until 1968.
1200 sq ft sounds more like the size of a new house in 1960. I think the size of existing housing stock was much smaller. Perhaps less than 1000 sq ft.
The article linked above shows the average size of a new in 1950 as 983 sq ft. I figure that by 1960 the average size would have been that or a little less.
The houses they were building in Levittown in the late forties were 800 sq ft, but I think they had unfinshed attics that people used to add another room to their house.
I’m pretty sure the price of booze has not kept pace with inflation, so you’d need to spend more just to maintain your current consumption level as applicable. Actually this is another good time to bring up The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, at one point of which the title character and his wife are celebrating something, so they decide to splurge on a bottle of “Sparkling Burgundy”! As the story opens, he’s earning 7K a year and lives in a Connecticut suburb from which he commutes to the city by train. From the description in the novel–and this is an important point–the house is clearly a small cramped one. IIRC the young son and daughter share a bedroom, and it’s definitely a tract of “starter” homes in which the occupants feel so pinched that they typically throw parties to celebrate any promotion or raise that will enable them to move out of the neighborhood. As has been pointed out, the average size of a house was much smaller than today, so it’s pretty clear we’re not talking about a spacious, Leave It To Beaver type of house in which there are more than enough bedrooms for everyone. Nor would there be a den into which the dad could have a talk with the son, as so often happened in these vintage sitcoms.
OTOH I’d think TMITGFS could have afforded something bigger even at 7K annual salary.
Whenever we have these discussions, a lot of people ascribe the differences in lifestyle and spending power to all the gadgets and services that people didn’t have in the old days–cell phones, computers, the extra cars and TVs, and such. But I don’t see how those things can be more than a tiny fraction of the root cause of the difference between then and now, when compared with population growth and the resulting increase in competition for houses in desirable areas, combined with the demand for more living space.
IIRC virtually all coin and currency then in circulation has either been discontinued, redesigned, or had the metal content altered radically–except for nickels I believe. From the looks of it, he’d have to take all his money in the form of pre-1961 coin. I don’t think there are any forms of paper currency then circulating which are the same as today. Even the $1 note, which was the only denomination not to have been redesigned within the last 20 years, was different in 1960. IIRC there were no Federal Reserve Notes at that denomination, and all the dollar bills were Silver Certificates in those days.
If the OP could make it 1964 it’d be a lot easier, since bags of pre-1965 silver coins at a stated face value are commonly sold to investors. He could buy the bag before stepping into the time machine and not have to sort through them all to make sure there are no post-dated coins.
My wife grew up in Levittown and swears that their 3-bedroom house was smaller than our last apartment. I thought she was exaggerating a bit until now.
I think that I’d probably try taking some manmade sapphires and possibly some of the better fake diamonds. Yeah, I wouldn’t get the full retail value of them…but they’re VERY small, compared to coins and bills, and if I was careful about selling them, I think that I’d be able to do very well. I’d probably take SOME coins and bills, I’d just have the bulk of my wealth in artificially created gemstones.
I’d have problems finding the medical support that I need, though. Back in the 60s, my grandmother had to pee in a cup and test her urine to see if her blood sugar was so high that it had spilled into the urine. These days, I’m used to getting a drop of blood a few times a day…and sticking my forearm for those drops, I don’t even have to prick my fingertips. And it’s a tiny drop of blood, too.
Well in that case, what you want to do is go back to 1930. Open an account with a broker that will survive the Depression, with instructions to have all the dividends reinvested. This will cost you a few sapphires. Then you hurtle forward to 1960, where you buy your dream house for a song. Now here comes the tricky part. You must maintain possession of the house for the next 50 years without actually giving up 50 years of your life. Maybe start a family and then leave for Darkest Peru, writing occasionally. Then you zip forward to the current time, stopping off in 1963 to kick Pete Campbell in the nuts, and then: Profit!
As long as he has access to a modern-day high-quality printer and a $20 template, he could probably print his own cash. I doubt they’d be caught as forgeries 50 years ago.
I was born in 1961, the youngest of 5 siblings. My father worked as a construction foreman and later project manager, my mother taught school until the kids started coming. When I was born we lived in a tiny house in Saginaw, Michigan. Throughout most of my childhood, we only had one car, never new. One TV. Dishwasher - that was in the form of 5 kids. All in all, the big difference is we bought less stuff. We got new clothes at Christmas and birthdays. New shoes when school started. We didn’t browse to see what was new at the department stores, we didn’t have ubiquitious plastic T-shirt bags coming into the house every day. We went grocery shopping once or twice a week, and made due with the food in the house. Soda was for grown-ups, kids drank Kool-aid and water and milk with meals. Almost none of the food was pre-made - no Chef Boyardee or Oreos. If we wanted cookies we made them from scratch. And we were considered well-to-do in our town. We kids went to Catholic schools. We lacked for nothing. This wasn’t austerity, it was just how people lived back then.
I don’t know that I have an answer for the OP but the context about the size of houses in the 1950’s and 1960’s got me thinking. My house was built in 1960. It’s 2,400 SF with 2.5 bathrooms on about a third of an acre. Seems to me that the original owner must have made some serious coin to build the joint.
When I bought the place I had to have the furnace replaced. I could tell it was original because the installers phone number was still on it and had only five digits.
If I can be forgiven for mentioning Leave It To Beaver again, IIRC the two brothers shared a bedroom, which, as it appeared on the show, was huge. A bedroom that would typically be shared by two RL brothers, in that era, would be like a sardine can.
My brother and I shared a bedroom as we were growing up. Sometimes it felt like we were practically stepping on each other so it’s a wonder we got along as well as we did. Our house was about twice as big, apparently, as the average one built in 1957, but I never learned that until recently. We had three bedrooms and 1.75 baths; I can only imagine how cramped it would have been if we’d lived in a typical 1100sf, two-bedroom one-bath house.
I remember before we moved back out to the country in 59 that our neighbors had 4 boys that all slept in one room with 2 bunk beds. I slept over at a friends house in grammar school and the whole family slept in one big room. When we moved back to the country, we lived with 5 people in two bedrooms and one bath. I think the bedrooms were originally one room and someone built a wall to split it into two rooms. The thing was, none of us was poor by the standards of the time. We all had indoor plumbing and a television and a car and a washing machine and a refrigerator.
I suspect that most other countries live in much smaller spaces than we do. I know it struck me when I first went into an Ikea store how much of the furniture was designed to maximize the use of smaller space than most of us is used to.
Home dishwashers were available as far back as the 1920s, but were extremely rare (the only people who could afford them tended to have mulitple domestics). The target market consisted of very affluent people who entertained alot, had expensive china, and didn’t trust their maids not to break it.
Around 1955 my dad was being pestered by a guy who wanted to become a gentalman farmer. He wanted to buy the ranch. My dad named a high price to get him to go away of $35,000 for 120 acres, all the cattle and farming equipmnent. He almost bought the place. In 2005 I sold my share of the ranch 20 acres for $350,000.
In in 1971 when I got married if we could have bought a house it would have been in the $20,000 range. at the highth my home was worth easy over $750,000.
In the same job classification as 1971 I am now making 9 times the wage.
Fractional baths are anything less than a complete, entire bathroom with bathtub and shower, sink with cabinets, and toilet.
I’ve probably gotten the realtors’ math wrong, but by 1.75 I meant:
1.0 = full bath–sink with cabinets, bathtub with a shower at one end, and toilet. Located between the two back bedrooms
0.5 = smaller bathroom–pedestal sink, toilet, and shower stall only.
0.25 = smallest bathroom off the family room that had only a sink and toilet.
Since this was a one story house with all the different living areas opening off a long, snaking pathway, the advantage of plumbing this way was it gave you three bathrooms in different areas of the house. But, because it was all on one level, each bathroom had to be plumbed separately, so the builders presumably wanted to cut costs.