Paycheck

In 1986 I moved to Roanoke, Virginia. After bumming around from budget motel to budget motel for a few nights, I found a little motel that rented by the week, and I settled there for a while. It had some amenities: weekly maid service (clean the apartment and bathroom, fresh towels and washcloths, fresh sheets on the bed), cable TV and HBO, a kitchenette with a small fridge and a stove for cooking meals, and it was less than a hundred feet from a pancake house that served breakfast and lunch. It was in the center of town and close to every place I wanted to go. For a single person who wasn’t picky about lodgings (other than they had to be clean) it was fairly perfect. I lived there for a couple of years. I found out that the maid who cleaned the rooms was being paid $8/hour. I was a little surprised because 8 dollars didn’t seem like a lot for that job, considering the manual labor involved.

But what is 8 dollars in 1986 dollars worth today? According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s inflation calculator, $8 in June, 1986, was equivalent to $18.35 in December of 2018.

But let’s look at it differently. Suppose your job pays you $10/hour. What was that $10 worth in 1986? The answer: about $4.50.

The cost of living increases every year. But paychecks often don’t keep up. This probably isn’t news to many of you. But it’s something to think about, because the hole that workers are sliding into starts as a gentle slope that gets ever deeper as time goes by. What pay were you earning when you started your current job, and what pay are you earning now? Remember that when it comes to your job and your paycheck, no one is going to look out for you except you.