Gold standard

Microwaves. Air-conditioning. A computer. Must-haves, now, luxuries, then. An article in MSN Finance tells how to be a great-grandmother with your finances and save big with the flashback budget.

The only part of the article I found silly was the idea of cutting back to one car per family. Maybe that was OK back when women didn't work outside the home. These days, with the exception of a few major cities (San Francisco, New York, Chicago) and those few people who telecommute every day, each working adult in a family needs a vehicle to get to a job.

I found other parts of the article delightfully time-synchronous -- for example, smaller homes are certainly more possible now that we have flat-screen TVs and flat-screen computer monitors. Now if those high-tech items just cost smaller dollars....