Living a life more like the 1930s creates challenges, it also helps us to understand of where we are today verses 95 years ago.
Something switched in my mind the day that Charles and I oiled our treadle machine with this small can of oil. It suddenly made this study more clear to me and what we are learning from it all.
I went into the dining room and spread out some of my old vintage budget books and I started looking to see if I could figure out how much the categories have changed throughout the years.
I wondered is it possible to get ourselves to where we have a 1930s budget? What would we need to give up?
I thought about how happy I was in the 1960s living without much at all when I first started keeping my own home. We had running water and electricity and that made us perfectly comfortable.
We had a small living room, a sofa and chair, an eat in kitchen that had a small table and chairs on one side. We had a small bedroom with a bathroom. There was no television, no radio, no washer and dryer, and no telephone, no air conditioning. But we had a refrigerator and stove and a clothesline and a 1955 ford for our transportation and it was home.
We visited with our neighbors and they visited us. We were outside more often then now. We walked more and were more present in our mind and eyes.
We had rent, groceries, electricity and water, gasoline and car maintenance. We had personal care items and household soap and such but not much of that. Clothing and shoe and fabric purchases were minimal and seldom. Going out to eat was only a special occasion and that would have been a corn dog and tater tots maybe once a month but not always. We could not afford to go into a sit down restaurant and there were no drive throughs during this time at least where we lived. If there had been this would have not been afforded.
We were in the military and lived off base but we did not have to pay for our medical as we do today and that is a huge difference. We eventually got life insurance policies that we were pressured into getting by the door to door insurance man. We did not have car insurance at that time. We only had what we could pay for monthly. Eventually after several years we bought a record player with a radio.
I do not know what it was like in the 1930s but I am trying to learn. The washbowls are good to use even today for families that have several children and only one bathroom. When there is a washbowl in a bedroom one can wash up without tying up the bathroom.
There are expenses they had and did not have during the 1930s compared to what we have today.
I started studying to find what changes were in the budget books from the 1930s to the 1940s and then to the 1950s? I could see that each decade people increased their spending categories and there was more / marking out items and writing in items into the budget.
I started wondering if it were possible to live a life today using the budget book from the 1930s? Could we somehow scale down to a point that we are somewhat similar to their entries?
So instead of doing the figuring alone, I thought that I would bring you along to see how you do with sorting this out.
What do we have to get rid of? What do we have to add on to the categories?
We know that there is no way to match the money amounts but can we even fit ourselves into the categories? Is it possible to scale down enough to somewhat match the 1930s budget?
Can we exchange an expense category that they had for something that we do not have today? Something else that is similar in costs?
This comes from an actual 1930 budget page 1
1930 budget page 2 The budget has only these two pages other than a summery on the back for income tax. I cannot explain what cities service securities are and I read the old newspapers about it and still could not understand it. Something about rates an investments.
Here above I turned the top of page one so you can read the entries easier since they were sideways.
I started thinking of many things we purchase today that we did not purchase when I started keeping house.
We did not have plastic garbage bags that line our cans, those have gotten so expensive now and we never bought them before. Our groceries came in paper bags and we had very little waste. We burned our food scraps and waste in a burn barrel. Today composting is very important because our soil is being depleted so many things can be composted.
We never used zip lock bags and such, we just used glass containers and jars. Wax paper and or just cloth.
I cooked with salt and pepper and very minimal spices. I rarely used aluminum foil and when I did I re-used it when I could.
We did not purchase paper plates and cups, did not buy the drinking cups with straws and sippy tips of today because they did not have them. Only baby cups came with sippy side. Just used a regular drinking glass or a jar that something came in.
The ice listed in the budget column is ice for their ice boxes (Ice Refrigerators). We do not have that fee today so maybe we could put something in place of that. What I can find is the average cost of the large blocks of ice delivered to the home is $3.54 per month. Ice was delivered daily when the weather was warm and sometimes twice daily. Maybe I might could put our air conditioning cost there? I will get Charles to do some math.
Pears are ripening early this year so I have been making homemade pear pies and sharing.
I could go on and on of the things that we purchase today that I did not purchase then. What do you remember that you did not buy long ago that you buy today, but is not really necessary to live simple and comfortable?
Next time you are buying groceries and get to the non food goods, ask yourself did they have this or would they have purchased this in 1930? Also, is there another way to do without it?
I would love for us to talk in the forum about the 1930s budget and the possibilities of how to get to a point that we could fit into the 1930s budget book.
If you do not want to sign up for the forum, you can still read along you just cannot comment if not signed up. It cost nothing to sign up, the sign up is just to help prevent spam from getting into the forum. We have a wonderful group of people in the forum.
If anyone ever reads something that does not belong in our forum please contact me privately by email which is in my contact.
Hope to see you there and hope that you have pondered on todays blog post and have given it some consideration. It could be very interesting.
Grandma Donna
