Those are good points, and I know that I didn’t take everything into consideration, partly because many costs vary so much from place to place.

I also can see that young adults are not as well off as their parents, as my own family’s income would be less than than the adjusted income of either my parents’ or my husbands’ parents when they were our age, even though we have more years of education combined than either set of parents.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that we need to adjust our spending and saving to meet the needs of the times, rather than always wishing for things to be the way they were.

You might be interested in a couple of other ideas that are floating around out there:

I have heard that we have unusually low food costs here in the US (something like 8% of income). I wonder how things would look if you compared the cost of health care, education, housing, a car, etc. in 1980 to today relative to income levels?

Also, your numbers would suggest that we are a lot better off economically today, but I keep hearing things about how today’s young adults are worse off financially than their parents were and how this is an unusual trend in our history.

I think it’s possible that we aren’t better off overall because while our incomes have risen a lot and the costs of certain necessities have not risen proportionally, other costs have risen disproportionately.