Our health insurance is crazy high, $900 a month. My husbands work pays a measly $300 of our $1,200 plan. I bet health insurance didnt used to be that expensive.

The major difference between myself and my parents is student loan debt. They never dealt with it as they didn’t attend college. It’s a debt I’m completely okay with as its allowed me greater opportunity.

I guarantee the amount my parents spent at disco clubs in the late 70s (with inflation factored in) probably trumps what I pay on a monthly basis for entertainment. I’m cheap in that regard.

I cut cable out all together, and I went to having only a cellphone instead of having a home phone too.

Consumer goods and commodities are the same or less relative to average income. A gallon of milk now costs the same as back then — as a percent of what people made.

The two listed exceptions:

Housing
Automobiles

Which were both an order of magnitude higher compared to income. To that list I think we can agree to add college tuition and health care.

Naturally the modern “average” home or car is bigger/safer/fancier than back then. Still there’s no doubt that even a basic house or car costs much more than it did three decades ago.

In addition, I would argue that consumer items have to be purchased more frequently now due to planned obsolescence and / or low reliability and quality. A phone, oven, couch, or even bedsheet won’t last as long and therefore will need to be purchased more frequently. Linens, dishware, cooking utensils and so forth used to last effectively forever. People would hand them down. My parents first couch lasted 40 years before they chose to replace it. Our couch lasted three before literally falling to pieces.

I agree that bills like cable, cell phone, etc. are extra expenses that didn’t exist in the past however they are small in comparison to the major expenses that have increased the most.

So, three conclusions:

1. Do everything possible to keep the major costs of housing, transportation, health care, and education down as much as possible. Spend the effort there first, rather than worrying about your cell phone minutes.

2. Then expend the effort to find quality wherever possible. This is difficult as even paying more won’t always work. You might have to buy old instead of new to get things that will last. But the less frequently you have to purchase basic needed items (no one will argue, I hope, that an oven, furniture, and basic housewares are necessities).

3. Then analyze the extras to see whether they are really needed.

Essentially what this means is that if you want to live in an average home, you need to earn a substantially above average salary, and you probably need both partners to be working. My parents bought their house in 1973, and keep telling me “it was terrible, in the 1970s mortgage rates went so high we had hardly any money left for food”. And I reply “but at least you were able to get a mortgage for 3x my dad’s salary and that bought you a three-bed house with a garden!” 3x the average salary in the UK would barely buy you a one-bed apartment now.

We’ve been in this weird situation where you need a vast amount of income to buy an average house, but your monthly payments were actually fairly low (this is of course what tempted a lot of people to lie about their annual income to get a mortgage; they only looked at the ‘monthly payment’ and saw it was affordable). It means that many families have a large mortgage, the two-incomes they needed to get that mortgage, but lots of disposable cash because they’re doing the equivalent of ‘making the minimum payment on your card’ on their mortgage every month.

It’s not that the many little luxuries are what’s causing us to need two working parents. Families need to have two working parents to get the mortgage, and then find that – unless they’re disciplined and pour all their spare cash into paying down the mortgage quickly – they fall into spending their extra income on little luxuries.

There has been some lament that the days of the single-parent breadwinner are gone. This did not happen because we want more stuff, but instead so that we can pay our crushing tax burden. It’s especially insidious to have to pay for child care so that both parents can work to achieve this.

The couch my parents bought they kept for 30 years. They drove the same car for 23 years. I don’t remember clothes coming from a store until I was in my teens and started buying my own. Maybe an occasional thing from Sears or the Penneys catalog.

I don’t think we ever had a new appliance, nor did we have a ton of kitchen gadgets.

When my husband and I got married we didn’t own an electric can opener, a blender, a mixer, an electric coffee maker or a TV. This was in the early 80s! Our friends thought it was nuts, but I was able to bake bread, whip cream, etc., etc. with a spoon, a whisk, a bowl and a lot of elbow grease.

Now I have become addicted to my conveniences. I don’t use my bread machine because I prefer the touch method for testing dough, and prefer the texture and shape of loaves I make by hand, though I am not averse to starting the process in my kitchenaid.

My husband doesn’t remember shaving with a straight razor, but I do. Now we are told that a triple or even quad razor blade isn’t enough, but that we need 5 blades to get the job done.

Along with the conveniences I think we have lost some of the pleasures of life. I have to maintain a printer, computer, router, laptop, stereo, direct TV, dvd player(s), cell phones, etc., etc., etc. My dog doesn’t need merely to eat dog food, but to have special diet food, regular vet visits complete with blood work that cost more than most developing countries spend on a human in a year. When I was a kid a dog was a dog, and while we took care of them, no one thought of replacing a canine hip or some of the other procedures formerly reserved for humans.

Although I resist the big screen HD tv thing, the Ipod, the BlueRay, the texting, etc., I find somethings have become a requirement simply because of the change in the world around me. For instance, I could no longer resist cell phones when the pay phones began disappearing. Vehicles are nearly impossible to maintain and repair on your own anymore due to the computerization of components.

Also, for the most part, things aren’t built to last. Case in point–Bell Telephones. If you have an old Bell phone, you still likely have a working model but you’ll have to pay more for a rotary line. I average a cell phone a year. They simply aren’t built for the long term. Some of this is our own fault. We have become a Wal-Mart culture, and either we don’t know how to spot quality in the items we purchase or we don’t care.

In some things it is virtually impossible to find a product built to last. My precious Levi jeans used to be dynamos. They fit right, were constructed well and lasted for years. A couple of years ago, they changed my Levis. Now they are a different cut and instead of being heavy-duty, now include Spandex and are much lighterweight material. My last pair (for which I paid the ordinary price after searching in vain for ones made the old way) wore out in less than 4 months! Completely unacceptable.

Now that most of my friends and relations are online, and now that many, if not most, jobs are posted online it is difficult to avoid internet service. How does one stay connected to the phone phobic, email-manic world otherwise? Even my church sends its information not through phone chains as was done when I was a kid, but almost exclusively through email.

The point of this is that, as others have pointed out, we do have expenses our parents didn’t have, and some of them we don’t have a lot of control of. For me, however, I am learning to research things better. I pay a higher price for my internet service, but I use a local company, which is something I highly value. I do make every attempt to ensure that clothing I purchase has lasting value, and am searching for a replacement for my Levis(sniff). I research how a car is built, and study designs so that I am purchasing classics that fit into my esthetic but also will not be “out of style” in no time.

With technology comes convenience, at a cost. One or two hundred years ago, one would have virtually no bills at all. Perhaps a small property tax and a church tithe, but that’s about it. The thought of paying for electricity or cable would have been unthinkable, because it didn’t exist. That generation didn’t make that choice, they used what was available to them at the time and by their means. I have a hard time thinking we’re slaves of technology, because my parents simply didn’t have the technology available to them. Sure they didn’t have the internet, because the internet didn’t exist. But my great-grandparents didn’t have a phone bill, because that didn’t exist. Their great grandparents didn’t cable, electric, water, or sewage bills, because virtually all of those things didn’t exist in the capacity we know them today.

I don’t know, this post rings all sorts of opposite emotions for me.

What I find has contributed to my *choices* that cost me more money are primarily that:

a) I did not want to live in the same small town, so I am now paying 10-15x what my mom did (in 1970′s dollars) for a house in the ‘burbs (in today’s dollars, the suburban 10 year old house values at 6-8x what her old small town one does),

b) college is generally expected of our generation, so I am the proud owner of five-figures’ worth of student loan debt,

c) we can’t (and I wouldn’t anyway) work on the car in the front yard like my grandpa did- both because the city doesn’t allow it and because today’s cars don’t facilitate it the same way,

d) I refuse to use oleo on my toast or feed my kids most of the inexpensive HFCS-filled or processed foods (of course, food is so much cheaper for us than it was for them as a percentage of income). I also don’t have the temperament or weather for a full-yard garden to help with produce,

e) I pay a ton for good health insurance, full coverage for my cars, homeowner’s insurance (remember in grade school- the kid whose house burned down and they just lost everything? No one had homeowner’s or renter’s insurance then), enough life insurance to make sure my kids can still go to college, and a chunk in to my 401-k. All things my parents didn’t have to deal with or couldn’t think to afford.

So a lot of the reasons we spend more money are because of conscious choices, obligations our parents didn’t have, and- like everyone else has mentioned- the little luxuries we consider necessary now (like internet access). Incidentally, my parents also consider internet access necessary now, so it’s not just a generational thing, it’s keeping up with the times.

I think Comments 25 and 52 are great also.