[jccooper]

If you had $1.50 in 1945 and held it until today, you'd have $1.50. Problem is, in 1945 it would have bought you lunch for a week, and today it would buy you one miniature fast food hamburger.

My parents tell me tales of my great grandparents who didn't trust the banks and probably buried money in the yard near where I live. If they buried it in cash, well, it wouldn't be a very impressive sum today.

That same $1.50 invested at 3%, you'd have... $12.22 today. A little better, but inflation's still pretty rough. You'd have been better off buying that pair of overalls in 1945.

Now, $1.50 worth of gold in 1945 would be worth $57-ish today, so if my great grandparents didn't trust the greenback either, then that theoretical coffee can is worth something. But don't take that as investment advice; the dollar price of gold went through the roof when the dollar was taken off the gold standard (go figure) and that's not going to happen twice.

[shearnie]

My wife's grandad left her some cash as an inheritance. It was only something around 20k. But he saved diligently for his grandkids for years and year even before they were born. I wonder if at the time it was a decent savings but just destroyed by inflation.