After living without a TV for the past 5 years and not having internet at home for most of college I’m totally confident in my ability to get out of the house and find what I need, not pay for things to keep me in.

TiVo or satellite radio: over here in Europe we don’t have it, and I certainly don’t miss it! Smartphones: benefit is grossly exaggerated. You really DON’T need to be in touch any time. If they need you, they’ll call or text you.

Not iPhones or cable or high-speed internet.

People spend much more on the above than in the 1950s.

Who wants to live in a 1957 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 1000 sqft. Levittown house anymore?

Or share one used car per household when they can finance one new car per driver?

More like $100 after you calculate the price of all the downloadable content.

On rare occasions I will pre-order the special edition of a game, but most of the time I will just wait until the price of the game to drop.

It doesn’t usually take the price that long to drop down to $30. I usually wait until it is $20 which takes a little longer. With PC games, you can usually get all the DLC included for that $20 if you wait long enough.

And really, you only have to wait once, since once you do, there will always be ‘old’ games that have dropped in price that you can purchase while you wait for the next one.

However, Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi debunked the the “everyone is squandering their money on luxuries” theory when researching their book “The Two-Income Trap”.

The book outlines the rise of the two-income family and highlights the consequences when one parent loses a job.

It is an excellent read with stellar research to back up their assertions. There are many illuminating cost-of-living adjusted for inflation calculations cited.

What evidence do you have that backs your theory?

It would be nice to shrug off cell phones causing brain cancer, etc. as a myth, but from what I’ve read there is no conclusive evidence either way. Part of the problem seems to be that alongwith independent studies, phone companies also fund many studies. According to some of the articles I have read and listed below, the studies done by the phone companies (who have a vested interest) show no danger while the independent studies show differently. In a really good piece on This American Life, one author quoted neuroscientist Leif Salford saying, “This is really the largest human biological experiment ever, because we don’t know what the long-term effects are going to be.” This rings true to me only because cell phones have not been around long enough for us to really see their effects.

http://www.pri.org/health/are-cell-phones-frying-our-brains2039.html

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/406/true-urban-legends

As wealth increases, it seems that the certain lifestyles become expensive as more and more people have access. In the 50s, fewer people went to college, but it was more affordable and likely that young people would pay for their own education. Now, a great number of students get loans or have had parents save for them, and the price of education has risen drastically. These are “necessities” that are also very expensive.

It does cost money to even aspire to a certain lifestyle in many cases.

I see some items are cherry picked, but what about others?

What about a car and having to buy gas for it. Or having to buy electricity instead of using candles.

Couldn’t these things back in the day be considered “high cost of modern living”?

The high cost of living is just the progression of an increased standard of living. While some mentioned are maybe lifestyle inflation, most of these items are not and are becoming standardized in our society (ie cell phones).

“please consider taking out that throwaway comment about cell phones causing brain cancer. It simply isn’t true and by leaving it here you are giving this myth undeserved legitimacy.”

Funny. People said the exact same thing about cigarettes in the 50′s. Huh.

my wife and i had a two-line plan with verizon and i had a data plan for my BB. i killed my phone and will use my work phone for rare personal calls, and we bumped up my wife’s minutes to cover my weekend chats with mom.

in total we will save over $900 per year (that is if i don’t get busted by my boss), and i get so sell my BB on eBay. i had to pay $125 to kill one of the two lines we had with our plan.

after the video post earlier this week about investing for your kids to have some money to start out, i decided to look into paring back (yet again), and found that i could initially fully fund my kids’ accounts just by killing my cell phone and data plan.

between cable, internet, the cell phones, we were paying about 6% of our take home for data/media content.

Thanks for this article. But please consider taking out that throwaway comment about cell phones causing brain cancer. It simply isn’t true and by leaving it here you are giving this myth undeserved legitimacy.

So what if someone likes their iPhone?

Personally I enjoy hiking so I spend much more on a knife or boots than I would on a phone. Oh well.

I use to check and send e-mail, read the news and technical articles, and do search based research on my phone. I can’t do any of that anymore, but a strange thing happened. The world didn’t end. No one complained that they could not reach me or that I didn’t respond fast enough. I now have a lot more time – I no longer fill up my free time with my eyes and fingers glued to my phone.

I still want a smart phone (yes, I’m a geek) but I’m no longer in a hurry to get one. Every day I can use my now “dumb” phone I save money and – amazingly – have more time.

Technology is evil. Modern conveniences are evil! We spend too much! The past was the greatest.

Well, sorry to put it to you, the past wasn’t that great esp. in the 50′s.

The 50′s:

You can get drafted.

If you’re weren’t White and privileged then you were blatantly discriminated against.

Cigarettes were “good for you”.

Medical tech was horrible considered to today.

QoL at the end of life was worse (why do you think there was Soc. Security on 56 years of age? Not many people were expected to live that long).

Life expectancy was worse. Polio. Smallpox. Malaria. Whooping Cough, etc.

Food was more expensive.

FDA was in it’s infancy. Quality could be poor.

If you didn’t conform with being WASP you were ostracized and it was a lot less permissive then today.

The Cold War – Nuclear scare-tactics. McCarthyism.

You couldn’t contact your family easily if you were far away.
Friends either.

You’re entertainment options were extremely limited to the “mass market”.

You couldn’t get “info at your fingertips” for anything. Every news item was days old on dead trees unless you had that “new fangled television” or radio.

Travel options were extremely limited and expensive. The “jet set” means that you had to be almost rich, save forever for a ticket (or in the military) to be able to fly.

etc, etc..

You have to take the bad with the good. You could somewhat circumvent all of these “evil modern distractions”. I would much rather have the medical breakthroughs, QoL, life expectancy with some distractions then the potential strife, disconnection and discrimination (if you weren’t White) from the past .

I wouldn’t want to go back in time even if you put a gun to my head.

My bf and I both grew up in nice middle class families with cable, we’re 27 and 30 years old, and we don’t have cable, no tivo, and its so freeing!

In the 21st century we are advertised to death, its ridiculous. When I was a teen I was glued to my tv, because there was always another tv show to watch, its nice to not have that anymore. It also helps to not have the constant commercials.

We do have internet access and computers, so we do pick and choose what we will give our time,attention, and money to. We both find the internet much more useful than cable.

But yes I agree with the end of the article that there is a cost to what we spend our money on. I hate the word frugal but even I have to admit, you have to be economic or you won’t end up with money towards the end of your life when you are old and really need it.

And for #95–if you’re making money with your Iphone–then more power to you!!

As for cable, I only have the lowest basic tier, since I have to have it in order to get internet (Comcast), but I hardly watch tv. I miss watching Discover channel and TLC, though. I just don’t really like watching “tv” on my computer screen, since it’s not in my living room.

I gotta try that chocolate covered bacon recipe… and with any luck, the chocolate covered women one too.

To me, too, that what it’s all about.

ETA: I actually thought this post was hysterical, because it put things like child car seats and the ShamWow at the same level. LOL.

Seriously…it’s a phone…it calls people…and yeah has apps that are very handy (maps + geolocation + local search, for example).

But for $70/mo? I dunno. I’m pretty happy with my $19.50/mo plan that gives me all the talk time I need.