They were also paying for that $65,000 house on one $10 per hour paycheck.
No, probably not. The formula used then was that you bought a house that was worth twice your annual income. So the family that bought a $65K house to be comfortable had to have an income of $32K per year.
My parents bought a beautiful little house in 1963 for $37,500. Dad was making about $25000 a year then, so making a $200 mortgage payment was a breeze. The same house is going for around a million dollars today. With that traditional formula the family would have to be making four or five hundred thousand dollars a year to afford it. And this is no mansion, just a charming four-bedroom cottage. Not many thirty-somethings have an income sufficient to buy a house like that near the place they grew up.
Uh.. So the price of a starter house is 12 times as much since 68, but wages have what? Doubled?
“Most parents bought their house in 1968 for $65,000, but it would go for $800,000 today...”
Who in the world was paying $65,000 for a house in 1968? It would have had to been the upper 1% of wage earners back then.