Keeping Up With The Cost Of Living? You Must. Now

Keeping up with the cost of living expenses is a constantly moving target. I saw this chart below while reading the morning news online. It caught my eye and made me reflect on how things have changed, cost-wise, and not really for the better in a lot of ways l might add. Of course, l couldn’t help bemoaning the fact that things were so much cheaper in those days.

Keeping up with the cost of living expenses

This cost of the living chart is from 1970. I was only six years old then but l would imagine the prices were probably nearly identical the year of my birth. I decide to update the chart to add the average cost for the same things in 2017. Yikes!!!

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When you dive deeper into the figures, you see how truly screwed we are as a society. The glaring statistics from the chart mean that:

The minimum wage in 47 years has only quadrupled!!! Just a teeny weeny bit over 4 times what it was. The median price for a new house is however 13.6 times the amount it used to cost! The average price for a new car is a multiple of 6.

This is why people can not catch up and live a decent life. When the top 1% have over 90% of the wealth, there is very little to go around. In order to live the life one had back in 1970, based on this chart, you would have to be making $140,690 per year! How many people do you know who makes that much?. For most people, the dream of homeownership remains just that. A dream.

This, however, doesn’t mean that one should give up. What is important is to strive and do the best you can to provide for yourself and your loved ones. Make as much money as possible.

Adjustment and flexibility is key in keeping up with the cost of living increases: This is where the proverbial 6P’s come in. Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

Bypassing the fluff such as movies (see how that has more than quadrupled 🙂 ), living frugally, which certainly doesn’t mean you have to deprive yourself, socking and saving your hard-earned money into funds such as employee 401k retirement plans.

This way you can lead a more comfortable life down the road. The point is to start as soon as possible because life will only get more complicated and yep..costlier. I somehow doubt for instance that the minimum wage will be increased to $20 just to appease the masses. Your motto? Look out for number one.

This is perhaps another good reason why people like me chose to take advantage of geographic arbitrage and move to places with a lower cost of living. It´s becoming clearer just how getting richer favors the already wealthy.

The middle class is disappearing at an alarming rate. By making sure you do your due diligence and take care of number one, you can have a much better life experience.

The pandemic has definitely not helped. We are almost three years into this covid nonsense and it seems that covid will indeed stay with us for the near future, and maybe even longer.

This means that times and situations will continue to be unstable. It is therefore of the most utter importance that you continue keeping up with the cost of living fluctuations  as best as you can.

People are losing their jobs and their way of life. Those who still have jobs have seen their hours decreased or have their health coverage reduced or taken away entirely because of that (no full-time job, no benefits).

One needs to hold down two, three, maybe even more jobs just to make ends meet. Makes you wonder what the future will look like.

Are you surprised at just how much the cost of living has increased? Are you keeping up with these cost of living? or are there some adjustments that need to be made.