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Audrey Hepburn


Thursday, January 28, 2010

The Value of a Dollar...Then and Now


Watching 'After the Thin Man' today, I was intrigued by the shocked expression on Nick's face when Nora asked for 14.75. This led me to wonder what that would be equal to, were I to ask the same amount from my husband today. I found this excellent little 'Inflation Calculator' a few minutes ago, and thought my readers might also find it interesting.

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

I'm sure there are similar sites for your own monetary deonomination, whichever country you live in. It's very addictive, figuring out what things were worth 15, 50, or 100 years ago.

It got me to thinking about 'Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House' a fabulously entertaining film from 1948, starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. They go way over budget in building their home ( I can identify) and both are extremely anxious when they find that their total expense of building their dream home has surpassed the 30,000 dollar mark. Seems to be a laughable amount until you figure that 30,000 in 1948 would have bought almost a 300,000 dollar home today. Ah, the beauty of inflation.

Oh, and 14.75 in 1939 would have been the equivelent to 230.00 today. Not necessarily pocket change.

3 comments:

A said...

Even if it was only $14 in today's money, my husbad would still freak out!

Zelzega said...

This explains so much as to why Ricky Ricardo flipped his lid at the idea of paying $20 more for a bigger apartment. That's like $160 !! I'd flip my lid too.

Ann said...

My hubby and I do this a lot - figure out how much things in old movies would cost today. We usually watch ganster movies, where the dollar amount is staggering! LOL

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