History If we only knew then.

I could just about manage the weekly payments.

 

I'll take a couple of 34 ford coupes

 

You'd have to be wary of the cars listed as "rebuilt". They probably have "salvage" titles and they wouldn't hold their value!

Lynn

 

it was hard to get $5 every week back then

 

Hell I have a hard time getting $5 a week now

 

Yep me too.

 

$5 was a lot of money in those days. It looks cheap, but it wasn't. Interesting they scammed or lured people on "payments" back then too. Nothing much changes I guess.

 

Yea but think of how little your trade in was worth!

 

My late Aunt often spoke of my Uncle who back in that time worked at a local creamery processing milk and dairy products 6 days a week and came home with $7 pay each week. She said that if he could get to $10 they would have had it made! Imagine that

 

I will take the 34 ford roadster!

 

Them was hard times. That buck or two a week could mean the difference between being hungry & real hungry for some familys...

 

And you worked your ass off for it.....

 

Hello,

My first job was a bicycle ride away at a trailer making company called Kit Trailers, just off of the Long Beach Freeway and PCH. They needed assembly line workers for various parts of the whole trailer, in a long lineup of stations. I was a cabinet maker/assembler. I used a three-prong drill press and drilled the cabinet hinge holes. After I stacked a big pile of the screw hole doors, I then moved to the hinge installation section on the other side of the pile, to assemble the hinges on the doors.

I got so good at that job that I had free time before the next guy could take the finished doors to the actual trailer and install them. I was told not to pile up the finished hinges on the doors into a huge pile. So, I made several piles. I was the new teenager and the guy in the next station was an older friend of the foreman.

The foreman was an a$$#0&$. He wanted me to work harder, but did not want me to make the next guy feel bad with more work. (I was a new kid and the old guy in the next station was an “old” guy.) He also did not like me sitting around waiting for the two piles to go down in the next station. So, without any instructions, he moved me to the adjoining table where the frames of the cabinets were being put together. I used an air powered staple gun and formed the joints of the narrow wooden pieces. I made a “T” and stapled them together, until I had a pile of them finished. Then I had to take the two stapled joints to another set to finish the side of a larger cabinet framing.

When the foreman yelled at me, I was surprised and drove a staple into my thumb. Instantly, blood came out. I went to the secretary for first aid. She gave me a band aid and said go back to work. It was a throbbing drooling bloody mess that took several band aids to stop the flow. I could not work, so after being assigned another “sanding” job, the throbbing pain was too much and I asked to go home. The foreman and secretary got mad and said if I left, I can’t come back. So, I got my paycheck of $7.50 for 5 hours of work. It was a $1.25 an hour job.

Jnaki

If I had known about that 1934 Ford station wagon for $3.79 per week payment plan. Could have been driving to the job and home, instead of using my bicycle. I actually could afford a weekly payment. That is interesting as I had never heard of a payment plan. My dad always saved up enough money to buy his next new car with cash. So, we always thought that was how people bought their cars.

 

I remember a new Corvette being 6k and figured no one could ever afford it unless they were rich. Jim

 

In 1973 I got a good paying job. $80 a week. My mom told me that my father had never earned that much...and he was Civil Service, a Post Office employee

 

Yes inflation. just the other day a guy was wanting a OT truck hood. I priced one that needed a bit of work at $100. He thought it was a bit too much. I told him that a $100 bill is now the new twenty take it or leave it. He took it.

 

Are they numbers matching cars?

 

I have driven antique/hotrod ONLY for 52 years and people have always asked if its hard to find parts. Nope, never was but now, if you find what you need, you better buy it

 

Adjusted for inflation, $5.00 in 1939 is equal to $89.73 in 2019


Adjusted for inflation, $215.00 in 1939 is equal to $3858.22 in 2019.......still doesn't sound to bad for a rebuilt '34.

 

If there ever was a time "if we only knew then" I'd put it in the 70's to the early 80's. Semi rare muscle cars and foreign sports cars really exploded in value after that. Everything else barely keeps up with inflation, a few makes are actually falling, early C3 chrome vette's come to mind, who would have thought a first gen Camaro and a whole host of regular production sporty two doors would be worth more. Once popular collector cars like 57 chevys and early T-birds have been stagnant for years, huge hit considering inflation.

 

LOL! Who is doing the "adjusting"? Those numbers are total BS.

Yeah, the gubbmint, the same people who destroyed the purchasing power of the currency in the first place. One reason they downplay monetary inflation is because COLAs are based on it, SSSI, etc.

One of Roosevelt's first acts as president was to close the remaining banks, confiscate all the gold coinage in the country (gold coinage was actually illegal almost 40 years) and then devalued the dollar by 40%.

Some asshat was on the TV not long ago recommending that "high denomination" bills be outlawed. Can tell that SOB hasn't set foot in a grocery store in the last 40 years, $100 (the largest bill) will get nuked so fast it'll make yer head spin. What we really need is a return of the $500 and $1000 bills if anything.

 

My dad told me his dad, who was a Ford mechanic, bought a `34 Ford in 1934 from the third owner. None of the other three could make the payments. He still had that car in 1946 when he gave it to my dad. As his first car.

 

Here's twenty dollars in 1933:



That's .9675 ounces of gold.
Current value of that much gold: $1405.

So it looks to a simple man like me that a dollar was worth about 70 times as much as now.

 

I DID know then what I know now. THAT is why I kept my first car....

 

My first and only new Harley was $1825.00 in the crate. I set it up my self. My wife’s 70 corvette was $3100.00. Times have changed.

 

My dad was a postman. I started working at the post office in 1973. I made a little over $4 an hour. That was twice what my dad made the year before with over 20 years service. I hired on at just the right time. I did ok but never great.

 

My father owned and ran a Richfield Service Center in a small town. Some customers would abandon their cars with him if the repairs were going to be outside their ability or desire to pay. He had a large parking area full of mainly 1930's cars out back. One was a huge Packard sedan with the iconic grill. He was not pleased when he found I was growing chickens in it. Every so often he would pay a wrecking yard to haul them off costing him $5 each.

 

actually even though the mint prints paper money 24 x7. there isn't but a small percentage of the trillions upon trillions of US (Petro Dollars) that is represented by the actual paper cash. Its all digital. just numbers on a spread sheet. What happens with the paper money is it wears out and the mint burns truckloads of worn bills ever day. with debit cards and electronic transfers you don't need high denomination paper bills. There is a move to make most transactions cashless. Harder to hide cashless deals from the tax man. Germany printed 10,000 frank notes and the result was paper money with the value of toilet paper. I disagree we do not need $500 and $1000 dollar printed paper money. As long as the supply of actual paper cash is relatively small in number. the actual USA dollar will still have some purchasing power. Especially in black market & one on one type cash deals. Our money went from the gold standard to the grain standard and now its based mostly on the price of a barrel of crude oil.