In my earliest recollections of the man, he was driving a 1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster. It was a four door model. To me, the Stylemaster and my dad were a natural pair – they even looked alike, as I saw it – through the eyes of a three year old boy.
When I was five, my dad brought home a 1953 Plymouth Belvedere four door sedan. It sported a fresh coat of mustard-gold colored paint. It was a real beauty and, it too, was five years old. The paint looked so good, I swore the car was brand new. My dad and his friend assured me it was not – but I was relentless. If a five-year old boy could see it, why didn’t my dad understand he had bought a brand new car and didn’t even know it!
One day while riding in the new Belvedere, mom made a note of the strange noise. Dad said it was the brakes. We had this car only a few months before this episode and it occurred to me, dad must have been right when he said the car was used. Even though I was a young man of five, I knew if the car was new, the brakes would not have been worn this quickly. It was at this point, the luster of the new paint did not thrill me anymore – and I also decided in the future, if my dad said a car was used, I would give him the benefit of the doubt.
Both these cars were nearly new when my dad bought them and they cost him less than five hundred dollars. Ten years later, he would purchase a brand new car for more than five times that price.
During those used car years, we lived in a suburban World War Two block house, in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. To me, it was a palace but my parents often complained it was too small and crowded. What can be crowded about a nine-hundred square foot house with four kids? The garage was clear in the back of the house. If you drove to it, there would be no backyard. So my dad closed up the garage, fenced the backyard and parked the car in the front – he made a parking area on the side lawn. The yard seemed huge to me but a few years ago, I was standing in the front yard on the sidewalk and a man was washing his car on the concrete driveway, in what used to be the backyard, and I think if we both put our arms out, we could have touched.
A few years later, I was in the sixth grade. One day, my teacher, who was always a well-spring of not-so-positive ideas dropped a bomb on us. She told us she felt sorry for her class because most of us would never know the joy of home ownership. The reason was the median price of housing just went above the ten thousand dollar mark! That was depressing. But I decided I would buy myself a house no matter what the price had climbed to. Nine years later, I became a home builder.
Between the twenty years from my dad’s used cars and the first year I purchased a brand new truck, 1975, the cost of living – or what the dollar could purchase – had gone up sixty-one percent. That truck in 1975, cost me just over four thousand dollars. In 1980, I purchased another new truck which cost me over ten thousand dollars. That was unreal and I swore I would never pay ten thousand dollars for a new truck ever again. I was right – but not in the respect I had in mind. Fifteen years later, I would spend three and one-half times that price.
The decade of the 70s, we saw huge inflation. The dollar in 1980 bought less than half what it did in 1970 because the cost of living had gone up over one hundred twelve percent.
Between the 80s and the early years of the new millennium, I don’t remember much about the trucks and homes I bought and sold because I was raising my family – so everything is just a blurr. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even during years of rising prosperity, inflation held fast and our dollar did not deteriorate as it had in past decades. From 1980 to 1990, the cost of inflation was down from the previous decade to fifty-eight percent; from 1990 to 2000, it was thirty-one percent and for the nine years from 2000 to now, it is less than twenty-five percent. And the 2009 dollar actually buys more than the 2008 dollar!
Of course, only God knows the future and we don’t know what harm all the bailouts and money printing will do to our economy. But we can look back to the last three decades and see inflation – or the bite in the spendability of our dollar – has been softening. This is a positive trend.
Unemployment is up but at a slower rate than the month before and it is still lower than mid-1975 and most of 1982 and 1983. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current eight and one-half percent unemployment includes figures for illegal aliens and those who have stopped looking for work. This is a major change from computing the older statistics – and inflates the unemployment rates. Meanwhile, the average hourly earnings were up point three percent for the month of March.
The translation of this is that most of us still have our jobs. Most of us are seeing our dollar go further. We still have our cars and our homes, our clothes and our gadgets – and our families.
There is good news all around us! Always remember, God watches the sparrow and He cares about you. Don’t live in fear but be thankful for all God has given us!
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Best of Times part three: 06 April 2009
In my earliest recollections of the man, he was driving a 1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster. It was a four door model. To me, the Stylemaster and my dad were a natural pair – they even looked alike, as I saw it – through the eyes of a three year old boy.
When I was five, my dad brought home a 1953 Plymouth Belvedere four door sedan. It sported a fresh coat of mustard-gold colored paint. It was a real beauty and, it too, was five years old. The paint looked so good, I swore the car was brand new. My dad and his friend assured me it was not – but I was relentless. If a five-year old boy could see it, why didn’t my dad understand he had bought a brand new car and didn’t even know it!
One day while riding in the new Belvedere, mom made a note of the strange noise. Dad said it was the brakes. We had this car only a few months before this episode and it occurred to me, dad must have been right when he said the car was used. Even though I was a young man of five, I knew if the car was new, the brakes would not have been worn this quickly. It was at this point, the luster of the new paint did not thrill me anymore – and I also decided in the future, if my dad said a car was used, I would give him the benefit of the doubt.
Both these cars were nearly new when my dad bought them and they cost him less than five hundred dollars. Ten years later, he would purchase a brand new car for more than five times that price.
During those used car years, we lived in a suburban World War Two block house, in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. To me, it was a palace but my parents often complained it was too small and crowded. What can be crowded about a nine-hundred square foot house with four kids? The garage was clear in the back of the house. If you drove to it, there would be no backyard. So my dad closed up the garage, fenced the backyard and parked the car in the front – he made a parking area on the side lawn. The yard seemed huge to me but a few years ago, I was standing in the front yard on the sidewalk and a man was washing his car on the concrete driveway, in what used to be the backyard, and I think if we both put our arms out, we could have touched.
A few years later, I was in the sixth grade. One day, my teacher, who was always a well-spring of not-so-positive ideas dropped a bomb on us. She told us she felt sorry for her class because most of us would never know the joy of home ownership. The reason was the median price of housing just went above the ten thousand dollar mark! That was depressing. But I decided I would buy myself a house no matter what the price had climbed to. Nine years later, I became a home builder.
Between the twenty years from my dad’s used cars and the first year I purchased a brand new truck, 1975, the cost of living – or what the dollar could purchase – had gone up sixty-one percent. That truck in 1975, cost me just over four thousand dollars. In 1980, I purchased another new truck which cost me over ten thousand dollars. That was unreal and I swore I would never pay ten thousand dollars for a new truck ever again. I was right – but not in the respect I had in mind. Fifteen years later, I would spend three and one-half times that price.
The decade of the 70s, we saw huge inflation. The dollar in 1980 bought less than half what it did in 1970 because the cost of living had gone up over one hundred twelve percent.
Between the 80s and the early years of the new millennium, I don’t remember much about the trucks and homes I bought and sold because I was raising my family – so everything is just a blurr. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even during years of rising prosperity, inflation held fast and our dollar did not deteriorate as it had in past decades. From 1980 to 1990, the cost of inflation was down from the previous decade to fifty-eight percent; from 1990 to 2000, it was thirty-one percent and for the nine years from 2000 to now, it is less than twenty-five percent. And the 2009 dollar actually buys more than the 2008 dollar!
Of course, only God knows the future and we don’t know what harm all the bailouts and money printing will do to our economy. But we can look back to the last three decades and see inflation – or the bite in the spendability of our dollar – has been softening. This is a positive trend.
Unemployment is up but at a slower rate than the month before and it is still lower than mid-1975 and most of 1982 and 1983. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current eight and one-half percent unemployment includes figures for illegal aliens and those who have stopped looking for work. This is a major change from computing the older statistics – and inflates the unemployment rates. Meanwhile, the average hourly earnings were up point three percent for the month of March.
The translation of this is that most of us still have our jobs. Most of us are seeing our dollar go further. We still have our cars and our homes, our clothes and our gadgets – and our families.
There is good news all around us! Always remember, God watches the sparrow and He cares about you. Don’t live in fear but be thankful for all God has given us!
This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 7:58 pm and is filed under best of times, commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. // Both Comments and Pings are open ?> You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.