Could a paycheck be as little as $35 dollars a week in the 1960s and be able to survive?

[Justice wanted]

Okay I've been getting obsessed with Mad Men. Love the show BUT I'm listening to it and One Character mention they made $35 dollars a week While another one said they made $75 a week.


Are those Real numbers? Could someone make that much in the 1960s and survive?

Sorry born in the 70s and raised in the 80s and 90s and don't want to offend anyone or age anyone but just wondering if it was possible for someone to live off that.

What was the prices of Bread, Eggs, rent like?

[VenusRising]

1. I was born in the 70s, too.

Here's grocery prices for the 50s and 60s.

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50sfood.html

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60sfood.html

[Justice wanted]

4. WOW! That is just shocking. Thanks for the websites.

[TheWraith]

32. $35 a week in 1960 would be $255 a week today, adjusted for inflation.

So yes, it's low, lower than what someone making minimum wage would get today. But not unliveably little given the low standard of living at the time.

In contrast, $75 a week would be roughly $545, adjusted for inflation, a much healthier salary.

[ananda]

2. Yes, those are real numbers.

My very first job at a bank in 1966 was at $1.42 an hour.

My first job after college in 1970 was $325 a month.

I should add, I remember getting a couple bags of groceries
for about $10 that I would pay $60 to $80 for now.

Gas was about 35 cents a gallon, also. It's more than ten
times that now.

[Justice wanted]

12. Thank you for sharing. It is just hard to imagine for me.To me it is shocking. With those prices

and my husband's paycheck today we could live comfortable even above comfortable. What drove up prices so much?

[TransitJohn]

27. Seriously? What drove up prices?

Ever hear of inflation? Ever take a basic economics course?

[hfojvt]

38. inflation is just a word

"What causes inflation" is not really answered in a basic economics course.

I notice you don't have a theory.

Heck, I spent three years teaching basic economics courses, and I couldn't give you a simple clear answer for why prices went up.

[undeterred]

21. I was a child in the sixties so I don't remember as much

but I do remember going on driving vacations and my parents talking about the price of gas. I remember it being 29 cents a gallon and they came out and pumped it for you and washed your windows too!

And you could get a nice dinner out for the family for about $5 and it wasn't an insult to leave the waitress some change.

[pkz]

3. yes, my parents' mortgage was 60.00 a month

and boy...could my Mama stretch a dollar!


Fresh Eggs 49 cents per dozen

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60sfood.html

[hobbit709]

34. My parents bought their house in 1967. $100/mo payments.

[hfojvt]

39. I bought my house in November 2001. Payment was 215 a month.

And I didn't buy the cheapest house in town either.

Houses now are bigger, come with carpeting and finished basements and double garages and often appliances. Mine came with a dishwasher, but not central air, but a large window unit.

[Fumesucker]

5. ...

[CAPHAVOC]

6. Yes

My job paid $1.25 an hour. Gas was 18 cents. I rented a Beach House for 65 Bucks with a couple friends. At the Diner, Bacon and Eggs with coffee was 99 cents.

[Kingofalldems]

7. Minimum wage was 1.25 around the mid sixties

That's about $50 a week, what I made. But I was in HS and lived at home. Would have been tough to make it on $35 a week.

[Morning Dew]

8. I grossed $68 a week in 1975 and managed to live on it.

I think my monthly rent ( 1 br apartment) was $50 / month

[quaker bill]

9. Yes

I lived in the early 1970s on about $50 a week. It was not easy, but doable. My dad bought a brand new car, a VW beetle in 1966, for $1576.00.

[Turbineguy]

10. In 1969

I was living quite comfortably on $90 per week and saving money (it earned 5% interest in a passbook account). But I did not own a car. My rent was $65 per month. Groceries were around $8 per week. I splurged on a jar of Grey Poupon (made in France then) for $4.75.

[Worried senior]

11. I graduated in 1962,

my first job in the loop in Chicago paid me @275.00/mo. When my son was born in 1964 we could get a lot of groceries for $15.00, rent was 35.00/mo and we did live on $35.00/wk. In 1969 I went to work in a nursing home, making $1.35/hr, worked six days a wk and with a little help I supported three little kids. There weren't any frills but we could survive.

[kestrel91316]

13. My dad never earned more than $28k/year in his USAF career,

and he retired in 1977 as a LtCol. He supported a family of 4 in a middle class lifestyle, bought a second home, sent two kids to college and graduate school, all without incurring debt.

$35/wk = under $3k/yr. One might be able to barely get by, I suppose, if somebody else provided the roof.

[yellerpup]

14. Yes, it was possible.

I was offered my first job as an Emergency Operator with the phone company @ $235/mo. in 1967 but I took a receptionists job instead because it started at $275. Rent was around $35/mo for a studio apartment, bills paid.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

15. My first real job, 1967 My take home was about $40.00 a week

I would budget $1.00 per day for bus fare, coffee & doughnuts for breakfast and two deli sandwiches and a Coke for lunch.

My rent was $80.00 per month in San Francisco.

cigaretts were 0.20 per pack or $1.00 a carton if you got them at the PX at the Presedio.

[Justice wanted]

16. Thank you all for sharing. It is unreal how prices have jumped between than and now.

[csziggy]

17. I don't remember exact prices for the most part

When I was driving 1968-1970, gas prices were about 17 - 18 CENTS a gallon. I've got the receipts from the gas card my parents let me use.

When my oldest sister started college in 1964 she had a full scholarship. That year my Dad, a self-employed mining engineer, made $6600 which put her above the eligibility threshold and the 65-66 school year she had no scholarship. That year Dad made $3300. The area he worked in has always had a very cyclical economy.

The house I grew up in was bought by my parents in 1952 and moved to the lot they bought for it. (It was from a mining town that was dismantled and the land under it mined.) They paid $500 for the house, about $1500 to have it moved and set up, and another $1000 for the land - their mortgage was a total of $3000. That may sound cheap, but there were years they had trouble making the payments.

Here is one source with average incomes and grocery prices: http://web.bryant.edu/~ehu/h364proj/sprg_97/hurley/index.htm

Here is another important index:
The Hershey Bar Index

[Spider Jerusalem]

18. $35 in 1961 = $265 in 2012

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

And anyone making $35 a week at the time wouldn't have been full time unless the $35 was take-home after withholding tax; the minimum wage was $1.15 an hour (increased to $1.25 in 1963):http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html

[slackmaster]

19. A paycheck is an inanimate object

The question of its survival is metaphysically absurd.

[aquart]

20. A piece of pizza was fifteen cents.

What is really important though, is knowing that the executives were not a royal class at that time, and their salaries were nowhere near as insane as they are now. Profits went to shareholders, not executive perks.

[Nay]

22. In 1971, I made the minimum wage ($1.25) at a bakery.

I rented a tiny frame house out in the country (15 min. from Sarasota, FL) for $75 per month. Part of the time I rode my bike to work, but later on as I made more money (think an extra 25 cents per hour) I was able to have a very used car (a Chrysler Belvidere) on that money. I don't remember what gas cost back then, but it wasn't much. I was able to buy food and pay utilities. I didn't have a phone, IIRC.

I remember going by a new car lot and looking at the price of a brand-new Jeep, just for grins. It was about $3,000.

I remember talking with my friends, and we all decided that we would be RICH if we could just get a job that made us $10,000 per year.

In the mid-60's gas stations would vie for customers by competing with prices. I remember "gas wars" during which gas was 17 cents per gallon.

In the late 50's when I was 9-10-11 years old, my brother and I would scour the roadsides for bottles so we could take them to the grocery for the deposit money (usually 1 or 2 cents each). We could find 15-20 bottles and buy quite a bit of penny candy with that -- some "penny" candy was 2, 3, or 4 for a penny.

[jdadd]

23. I remember getting sent to the corner store in 1955

My mother would give me a quarter to pick up a loaf of bread, I could keep the change. I think the bread was 18 cents, I'd have enough left to buy myself a popsicle...

[shraby]

24. I made $40 per week working at a loan office right out of high school in

1960. A few years later about 1965 my husband made $90 per week working 9 hours a night five days a week. By then we had 3 children to provide for.
Where I noticed the change was when Lee Iococa got a loan for his company and the upshot was cars went from about 3-4 thousand to 15 thousand each...that changed the whole landscape in the wages, prices, etc.

[alphafemale]

25. barely. probably a tad better than mininum now.

A single person maybe could have barely scraped along on that.

Nothing left over for dinners out or movies though.

Ron Paul does have one thing right. Removing the gold standard caused inflation out the yingyang. But I think trying to put THAT cork back in would cause a worse disaster.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. I remember when apartments averaged $50 per bedroom

When we cleaned out my mother's storage locker, we found a postcard that I had written from New York City in 1973 while on a choir tour. I had written about being outraged at New York prices: $2.80 for breakfast in our hotel!

During the 1950s, Walgreen's used to have a restaurant that served turkey dinners with mashed potatoes and a vegetable for 69 cents.

Paperback books were 25 or 35 cents, but thick ones like Gone with the Wind might be as much as 95 cents.

When I graduated from high school, my mother gave me a fancy blouse. She told me to be extra careful with it, because it had cost $16.

In 1963, my grandmother sold her 2- bedroom, 2-story house in a nice, middle-class Minneapolis neighborhood for $17,000.

Private college tuition, room, and board was $2700 total my senior year.

[Honeycombe8]

28. That's about half the average in 1960, according to a site I checked.

According to http://www.348-409.com/1960flash.html

The average yearly income in 1960 was $5,199. That's about $99 a week. So $35 a week is less than half the average at that time, which is a low wage.

Was the person on the show a low level worker? Or were they talking about take-home wages?

[Justice wanted]

29. I can't remember if that was Peggy's take home pay or before taxes where taken out.

She was a secretary at the time.

[Honeycombe8]

36. Ohhhhh. That explains it. It was a WOMAN'S wage. It was legal in 1960 to pay women less.

Women were usually paid less than men, often because it was assumed that the income was for extra spending money for the family. If the woman was single, widowed, or divorced (which was rare then), well, too bad.

In fact, if a woman was trying to get hired to do a non-traditional female job, it was thought generally that she was trying to take a hard working man's job who deserved that job and would do it better, anyway. It was legal not to hire someone because of gender, as well as to pay her less.

So women would not have been paid an average wage in 1960.

[wildbilln864]

30. our rent was $8.00 a week. so yes. nt

[B Calm]

31. In 1973 I made $5.25 per hr

working as an iron pourer at General Motors. That was damn good money at that time.

[hobbit709]

33. When I first came to Austin in Jan 74.

You could work 20 hrs a week at a $3.30 minimum wage job and pay your rent, buy groceries and go ot and party a couple of times a week.
My first efficiency apartment was $50/mo all bills paid.

[ladywnch]

35. reference point from the Dick Van Dyke show circa 1963 a *nice* tux cost $89.

and a nice dinner for four at home ran about $9 including dessert.

[Phentex]

37. Here's a blog about the Mad Men salaries and equivalents...

Don't know how accurate but it's kinda interesting.

http://blogs.payscale.com/content/2009/10/mad-men-tv-show-salaries.html

[Golden Raisin]

40. My most expensive book purchase

my 1st year at college (Fall 1967) was a massive, hardcover, 1,420-page "Complete Plays and Poems of Shakespeare" for $15.00. A really good Orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera in that same period cost about $13.00 (probably around $400 today). I don't remember exactly but I think my first salary out of College was about $95 a week. Yes, prices and salaries were infinitely lower than today and we were able to survive. Many of us were also raised by parents who had lived through the Great Depression and the shortages of WWII. THEY knew how to make every penny count in a way that would startle and amaze many young people today.