Comparing the cost of living between 1975 and 2015:

[hfojvt]

37. furniture and appliances are rare purchases

then again, so is a home and a car.

The price of both a "new home" and a "new car" though, have always been out of MY reach. Even the house I grew up in was three or four years old when dad bought it in 1964. I can remember though (so it must have happened in the 1970s) dad putting down tile in the basement, building a dividing wall and then later some crude pieces of furniture (our famous 'divider' was a home made shelf 8 feet wide and 6 feet tall where we stored a lot of our games and things. For years, my little brother's "bedroom" was an open area in the back of the basement until dad built another room under the stairs.

Then they carpeted the upstairs one room at a time, built a screen porch in the back, and a second garage and much later, in 1979, a family room.

Nowadays my siblings are buying huge houses (for smaller families) with all of that stuff already in it. Dad has five kids, most of my siblings only two (my older sister has three from two marriages).

I also find median income to be a sketchy measure. Because its rise and fall does not necessarily impact everybody. For a concrete example, here are the upper limits of each fifth (in 2001 dollars)

1975 - 14,572 - 27,404 - 41,312 - 59,436 - 94,771 (the top 5% made more than this)

so 40% of households made less than $41,312 and 20% made less than $14,572 (in 2001 dollars)

now 2007 (the most recent year I have in my file)

2007 - 20,300 - 39,100 - 62,000 - 100,000 - 177,000

Seems to me that the 2nd group, for example which used to make between 14,572 and 27,404 and later made between 20,300 and 39,100 is mostly better off, even though they are below a median income which is falling or staying the same. The top 40% is also much better off used to make over $41,312 and now makes more than $62,000.

Share of income looks like this (including number of households)

1975 - 72,867 - 4.4% - 10.5 - 17.1 - 24.8 - 43.2 - 15.9
2005 - 114,384 - 3.4% - 8.6 - 14.6 - 23.0 - 50.4 - 22.2

Smaller slices of the pie for everybody except the top 20% and the top 5%.