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The government checks are in the mail! So get ready for the biggest economic expansion any of us are likely to witness in our lifetimes.

What we don’t want to see is for all that money to get eaten up by inflation. I bring it up because of , which found prices for used cars up 17% over the past 17 months, warning that it may be a signal that inflation is kicking in.

It reminds me of the house I bought in Bellevue in 1980. I remember it like it was 40 years ago.

We had a new baby; we were living in an adults-only apartment and we had to move. We found a 1,400 square-foot house, we borrowed $5,000 from my wife’s grandmother for the down payment, and we signed a contract with the previous owners to make interest-only payments for the first five years at an interest rate of – are you listening millennials – 15%!

That’s a one and five followed by a percent sign. Why was I forced into this usurious deal? Because the inflation rate was 10.3%! The federal reserve kept raising interest rates to get it under control.

There were a lot of other causes, too, but all I know is that whatever caused it, nobody would want to relive those years (unless you were someone with a lot of cash because you could put your money in a three-month CD earning close to 19%).

So, when you get your federal recovery check, do your bit to keep inflation under control by treating it like it was money you earned. Drive a hard bargain when you buy a big-ticket item, and if you think you’re being charged an inflated price, be prepared to walk.

By the way, when I sold that house nine years later in 1989, my profit was $50. That’s a five, with just one zero — despite the new countertops I installed. So as you can see, the government’s anti-inflation policies worked just in time for me to become the last person in the Pacific Northwest not to make money on a house.

Let’s not repeat history. Spend carefully.

By the way, I looked it up. That house, which I bought for $72,000, is worth $876,000 now. Probably because of the countertops. It doesn’t even have a garage.

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