How to buy a farm! But times were hard and dad had no money for a down payment.

That didn’t stop him from reading the Stout catalog of farm properties for sale. When he saw that the picture included a stone wall, he would just turn the page. He’d say, “They didn’t haul in those rocks from somewhere else.” And he didn’t want a farm that had a lot of rocks in the fields.

Finally he found one that suited his fancy. It had 640 acres with about 300 acres in fields and the rest in woods.

There was a 19-room house and two large barns. The fields were mostly level and no rocks.

I remember arriving by automobile at the home of the owner of that farm. Dad went in to see the owner and offered to buy the farm, no money down and pay-as-he-could with no fixed monthly amount. He came back out to the car with no deal. The owner and his wife had turned him down. As we started engine of the car to leave, the owner came running out of his house. It was a deal. The total price for the property was $3,800. The owner would finance it at 4-percent interest on the principal.

Dad bought that farm in Somerset County, Maine.

When as a young married father, I needed a home for our small family, the farm my wife and I decided to purchase was located on a gravel road.

The house had three bedrooms and one bathroom.

The kitchen needed to be remodeled as did the bathroom.

There was an attached garage and small barn. Automatic central heat was supplied by an oil-burning furnace. There were about 80 acres with 20 acres in fields. A local bank agreed to finance the purchase with a total sale price of $ 3,300. The location was in Smithfield, Maine, which is also in Somerset County.

We sold that place in Somerset County to relocate nearer to my new employer in neighboring Franklin County. The house we purchased in New Sharon, Maine, was located on a corner lot of half an acre.

The house was in good repair and had six bedrooms, two bathrooms, an attached small barn and an attached two-car garage.

Central automatic heat was supplied by steam from an oil-burning furnace.

The Sandy River flowed by on the other side of the road in front of the house. We paid $10,500 for that house.  Before you rush off to find bargain real estate in central Maine, you need to know the rest of the story.

Those real estate purchases were made in times when the U.S. dollar had more value. Less money had more purchasing power than in the present economy. Wages people earned were much less than at the present time and all of the purchases made with money cost less accordingly.

When I purchased the 80-acre farm home in Smithfield, Maine, for $ 3,300, my salary was $350 per month. That works out to be about $ 2.01 per hour.

There was no pay for required overtime hours and emergency week-end and night time call duties. That pay scale was competitive for a person with my qualifications. I had an earned baccalaureate degree and had passed the certification examinations in clinical laboratory science.

The differences between property values and salaries seen presently and those of 70 years ago is one illustration of the inflated value of our money.

The money is now worth less and thus more money is required in all areas of the economy for purchases made.

The present policies of our federal government in printing and use of money will result in very substantial inflation.

We may see very great dislocation of our entire economy as a result of present fiscal policies.

But more on that later.