Cost of Living

My husband and I are looking for a new house (fingers crossed, we may have found one!  Eep!) because we need to cut costs.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a discussion on a board I frequent regarding house sizes.

We're a single earner family now, with a kid, making slightly below the average US worker's salary in a place that is slightly above the average US cost of living.

In the middle of house hunting, I got to thinking about how I've heard that the cost of living these days is so much more than the cost of living in, say, 1950.  How it's necessary now to have two-earner households in order to maintain the same quality of life.  It's something that I'd heard ever since high school and never doubted.

Now I'm not so sure.

I'm going to start some research this week because I'm curious.  Once upon a time I was talking to my mom about how tiny our house on the CA coast was.  She asked when it was built: 1948.  She told me, "Oh, that's a normal size for a home back in those days.  In fact, it probably housed a family with two kids.  Homes were a lot smaller then."  Really?  Something to research...average house size for a middle class family of 4 in 1950.  Incidentally, the house we are looking at renting is 960 square feet, two bedrooms, and is only slightly larger than the home we rented on the coast.  Rent is easily 25% of my net income.

The thought train continues...what are the common expenses of middle class households today, besides rent or mortgage?  Utilities, telephone, cell phone, internet, cable television (or satellite), credit card debt, food, car payment(s), car insurance, gas for the car, savings (ha!), renters or home-owner's insurance, clothing...what am I missing?  Tell me in the comments!

How many of those things did people use in 1950?  Clearly they didn't use cell phones, internet, or cable television.  But what I don't know is this: how much debt people carried around with them (today's credit card debt)?  How many cars did the average family own?  How much did they spend on clothing?  Did more people keep their victory gardens left over from World War II?  More things to research...

I wonder this now, because if I can cut down the rental expenses, get a garden going, cut back a bit on driving, and refuse to use my credit cards, then we can live a pretty comfortable life on my income alone.  We won't be taking any lavish trips, and we can add in internet costs, but we can make a nice little life for ourselves with the same kinds of expenses that I hypothesize the average household in 1950 had.  So do we need double incomes?  I wonder...

...and I'll get back to you.