Your Grandparents
Your Grand Parents may have grown up believing you never sold the family home. If so, it is a tad out of style but worth two to three times what they paid for it, unless you figure the interest paid, the insurance paid, the taxes paid, the repairs made and maybe even some remodeling.
Most everything they ever bought during their lives at your age, would now be worth many times over the price they paid, if they still had it and were able to keep it in clean new condition. Old Coke Bottles, old Barbie Dolls, old Art Work and most anything else including their change from their pockets which was silver.
But like most of us older generation, we have to sell something to retrieve its increase in value and buy another at todays prices to replace it. Profit? No, just maybe break even.
Your Grandparents may have been married 50 years or longer. To the same person. Had the same job until retirement. Lived in the same place for 45 or so years.
The profit is there for the rest of the family to fight over, when they die.
They were taught wrong. The investments most of them bought were not investments, but purchases for appreciation.
Something purchased might be resold at a higher price later on, or not.
Farmers made investments. Buy chickens, get more chickens, buy cows, get more cows, buy pigs, get more pigs, buy seed, get crops.
They felt secure in doing these kinds of investments, things that increased on their own. Just house them and feed them, profits.
Then competition came-fertilizer went up-seed went up-gasoline went up and inflation tore their futures apart.
Those who had businesses stood a better chance of holding on. But the big companies took over most everything.