A Financial Retrospective
When I began university in 1968 I started keeping a bookkeeping journal which I maintained religiously until 1975. Not only does it provide a social dairy ("...took Jenny to movies: 60c") but it documents the prices of everyting from cigarettes to movies to petrol and so on. Unfortunately, with the petrol I only noted the cost and not the volume, so I couldn't get a cost per liter except in special circumstances.
The two pages below are from February 1968, when I was a student, and 1972, when I started as a junior lecturer at UCT, some four years later. Cigarettes had increased by 5c a packet! I was getting about on a 250cc Honda motorcycle and still living at home with my folks and multiple siblings.
On 5th March 1972 I went to the Sunday braai at the Rotunda Hotel, very popular in those days. It cost R1-20 which seems like nothing, except that into day's money that would be R260, which doesn't seem so cheap after all!
In July 1969 I rode my motorcycle to Joburg to visit my girlfriend, and adventure which I regret to this day since it turned out she wasn't that pleased to see me. As an aside I rode non-stop through the night (both ways) which was an insane thing to do, but nevermind. Incredible that the petrol cost was only R5-43; I could barely get around the block on that today!
The table below list a few prices from the years 1967 - 1975. In 1967 I was working as a surveyor on the diamond barges off Namibia. The salary of R180/m is equivalent to around R32k today, which was a sizeable amount for an nineteen-year-old young man.
| Year | Salary: R/mth | Smokes: c/pkt | Petrol: c/liter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1967 | 180-00 | 20 | |
| 1968 | 21 | 8 | |
| 1969 | 23 | 9 | |
| 1970 | 23 | ||
| 1971 | 24 | ||
| 1972 | 227-00 | 26 | |
| 1973 | 273-00 | 27 | |
| 1974 | 30 | ||
| 1975 | 34 | 24 |