It was a time of big hair, shoulder pads and the Cold War. But something often less thought of when feeling nostalgic about the ‘80s, was the interest rates that were high enough to make you dizzy.

“The interest rates started the decade around 20%,” says Brad Lyons, a certified financial planner and an investment manager at Wiser Wealth Management based in Georgia. “They had [raised] them dramatically in the late 70s… trying to deal with inflation.”

Lyons was in his early 20s at the start of the 1980s. And though today’s interest rates still look small in comparison, there’s a lot that can be learned from people who’ve been through it.

Consumer prices are 8.5% higher than they were a year ago, according to July’s inflation numbers. In June, it was 9.1%. Rates like these haven’t been seen in decades.

And people who remember the ridiculously high interest rates that followed the high inflation of the 70s say buckle down and be prudent, because we’re in for a long haul.

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The Great Inflation of the 1970s and 80s

Experts have drawn parallels between the high inflation of five decades ago and what’s happening today.

Back then, there were several factors that played into it, low unemployment, the removal of the gold standard (the monetary system in which a currency is backed by gold), but energy prices pushed things to their limit.

In 1973 the price of oil nearly quadrupled when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) enforced an oil embargo on the west for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. There was a series of knock-on effects that caused inflation and stagnation to swell. Then, the Iranian Revolution at the end of the decade sent oil prices surging again.