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My grandmother passed away recently and I began to recall some of the stories she told me as a child.  I recall one particular story about how she remembered as a child her grandfather’s vibrantly green wagon with big red wheels hitched of course to some horses.  “I had fun playing on the wagon” she recounted to me.  She had that memory in her mind so vividly that she smiled when she thought about it almost as if she were a little girl again.
Her passing away and that memory got me thinking about how much the world has changed and perhaps why so many people struggle to get by these days.  My grandparents had managed to get by while raising 5 kids in the 40’s and 50s. Other families of the same era usually had between 5 and 8 kids.  My parents had four kids and that seemed to be the norm during the late 60s and through early 80s while today the average family has 2 kids.  In the time frame of three generations the number of kids being produced dwindled from 8 to 1 or 2.

This crisis, in part, is why there is a huge social security crisis coming over the next few years. The grandparents that had those 8 kids have grown up into aging seniors and their grandkids are only having one or two kids.

Granted there are numerous differences between the lifestyles of grandparents to today’s grandkids. For starters, grandparents didn’t have comptuers, cell phones, dvd players, x-box/PS2/gamecube, satellite/cable TV, iPods, HDTV, high speed internet, camcorders, and digital cameras amongst other things.  I don’t recall my grandparents ever saying anything about having to pay for health insurance nor did they have mandatory insurance for their vehicle back in the “old” days.

All this leads me to think that perhaps the real issue isn’t inflation as the main culprit for the situation many people find themselves in but the fact that there are so many modern conveniences or “luxuries” that people simply want to have in the lives.

Tomorrow, I’ll provide a cost summary of all these “luxuries” to see how far we’ve really come in our modern world.