Everybody Loves Your Money

David over at My Two Dollars has a great post talking about the value of items in 1972. It’s always shocking to me to see the prices from only 37 years ago. Here are a couple examples:

Avg house: $27600

Tuition to Harvard: $2800

One of the commenters noted that housing was only 2.3 times the avg salary back then and today it’s about 3.7 times. Very interesting……

Anyway, go check out My Two Dollars and see the rest of the figures. David is a good writer and definitely worthy of your RSS reader.

I find this absolutely alarming. Over 60% of students getting free or reduced lunch across the country? WOW!

http://www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=11&sid=227970

In a sign that people are getting even more desperate, more and more people are visiting psychics with financial questions:

More putting economic worries in hands of psychics, astrologers

In the article the psychic talks about some of the questions she has been getting. They include: “Am I going to be fired?”, “Do I need to do a short sale on my house?”, “When am I going to find a job?”.

I’m not sure if I find this article humorous, or disheartening. Obviously some people are finding themselves in more desperate circumstances and are running out of options. I also found it interesting that the psychic is acting as a quasi-economist and predicting a turn around in a few years. She also advises people to “watch their pennies” and “conserve and reserve”. I’m thinking maybe these people should visit some of the Personal Finance Blogs on the Internet. They may find much more useful information to help them deal with their situation.

I was talking to a frugal friend of ours a couple days ago and the subject turned to computers. I was shocked to learn that they had a Mac in their house as opposed to a PC. The reason I was shocked was because this family is VERY frugal. They live in a very modest house, carry no debt and minimize their spending more than just about anyone I know. While I try to be frugal, they are far more frugal than I.

A little background about them:

-They are married with 3 kids, a dog and a cat
-They live in a 1300 square foot house
-They drive older cars with no payments
-They only shop at discount stores
-They wear a combination of “hand me downs” and discount clothing
-They don’t have cable
-They don’t have a home phone
-They use a prepaid cel phone
-They don’t take expensive vacations

You get the idea. The bottom line is that they are very careful with their money, which I find admirable. I guess that’s why I was so surprised to find out that they are using a Mac laptop. If you’ve done any comparison shopping, you’d know that the Mac is usually about twice the price of a PC laptop. The only reason that I don’t have a Mac is because I can’t bring myself to pay the additional cost. There’s no question that Mac’s are good quality and I’m not saying that they aren’t a wise purchase, but they are more expensive than PC’s, which is why I was surprised to discover that my friend owned one.

As we talked a bit, I said, “I didn’t know you were Mac users. Have you always used Mac’s?” She said, “Yep, we’ve always used Macs because Jason’s brother owns a company that only uses Macs and he always gives us one of their old ones when they upgrade.” That’s when it all made sense.