Spending of Middle-Income Families: Incomes and Expenditures of Salaried Workers in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1950

Most previous investigations of family expenditures have dealt either with families of wage earners or with all families without differentiation. This Heller Committee study centers on white-collar families in which the chief breadwinners were employed in salaried occupations with earnings between $4800 and $7500—a group about whose spending habits little has previously been known.

The author analyzes the expenditures of 159 San Francisco Bay Area families. The reader will find not only the...