The government says inflation is around 3%. Your grocery bill, your rent, and your energy costs suggest otherwise. Find out what your actual inflation rate is.
CPI is designed to measure a theoretical average American household — which may look nothing like yours. The BLS uses methodological choices like hedonic adjustment, owner's equivalent rent, and geometric mean substitution that structurally compress the reported number. If you spend more than average on housing, food, or healthcare, your real inflation rate is almost certainly higher. Enter your actual monthly spending across 8 categories and we calculate your personal inflation rate, your years-to-halve purchasing power, and which of your current assets are actually keeping up.
Your personal inflation rate based on your actual spending weights
Breakdown by category: housing, food, transport, healthcare, energy, and more
Gap between your rate and the official CPI headline number
Years to halve your purchasing power at your rate (Rule of 70)
Which assets in your portfolio are beating — and losing to — your personal rate
Purchasing power timeline: what today's dollar buys in 5, 10, 20 years
The CPI uses several methodological choices that tend to reduce the reported number: hedonic adjustment credits "quality improvements" as offsets to price increases; owner's equivalent rent uses a survey proxy rather than actual rent paid; and geometric mean substitution assumes consumers trade down when prices rise, reducing the weight of expensive items. These aren't conspiracy — they're documented methodology choices — but they produce a number that frequently understates the experience of people who spend heavily on non-substitutable necessities.
Significantly different. During 2021–2023, official CPI peaked around 9%, but many households with high housing costs in major metros, frequent grocery shoppers, and heavy energy users experienced effective rates of 12–18%. Even in lower-inflation periods, if you rent in a city where rents rose 20% while official CPI reported 5%, the divergence is real and material for financial planning.
Two main applications: (1) Financial planning — knowing your actual rate lets you set realistic return targets for investments. If your personal inflation is 7%, a savings account at 4.5% is still destroying your purchasing power. (2) Asset allocation — you can see which assets in your current portfolio are genuinely keeping pace and which are falling behind, helping prioritize where to rebalance.
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