Once upon time, a family could afford almost everything with ONE income

Yugoslavia was a communist country, same as Poland where I'm from, if a little richer. Technically you could afford a home and a car in communist Poland easily, too. Prices and salaries were set by the state. The problem was that waiting list for actually buying the car/home you could theoretically afford was 20 years :)

If you waited for your car (or had contacts that let you skip the wait) and bought it - you could then immediately sell it for 5 times the original price on the black market :) But almost nobody did - because money had little use.

Wasn't it similar in Yugoslavia?

It seems so - according to https://rememberingyugoslavia.com/podcast-fico-zastava-750/ in 1969 there were 82 cars per 1,000 people :)

Not eactly the workers' paradise you present it as, BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...

> Unemployment was a chronic problem for Yugoslavia.[20] The unemployment rates were among the highest in Europe during its existence, while the education level of the work force increased steadily.[20] The unemployment rate reached 7% in the early 1960s and continued to grow, doubling by the mid 1970s. There were extreme regional differences in unemployment, with the Slovenian rate never exceeding 5%, while Macedonia and Kosovo constantly had rates over 20%.[21] There was also a notable element of gender discrimination in the unemployment rate. When forced to cut workforce, enterprises usually fired women first,[22] expecting that women can be supported by their male family members.[23] Some enterprises also requested that candidates for a job needed to have their military service completed, which excluded women.[24] Female participation rates were lower than in other socialist countries and closer to traditionalist societies of Southern Europe.[22]

If a country turns into a civil war clusterfuck the moment the state control loosens up slightly - there must have been something seriously wrong with it.