With inflation soaring, it’s more important than ever to calculate your household budget.
The government publishes an official inflation figure to give us a general picture of how quickly consumer prices are changing. On the latest data, they rose 10.1 per cent in the year to July — and it could get worse. Economists at Citigroup have forecast a peak of over 18 per cent in January.
But these are averages, calculated across all kinds of consumer spending and all types of household — student and pensioner, rich and poor, single-person and family-sized.
To get a better grip on how inflation is squeezing your own budget, you need to work out your own personal inflation rate — how the prices of the goods and services you buy are rising.
In broad terms, energy, fuel and food prices are now seeing the highest inflation rates, so people who spend more of their money on these basics — often low-income householders — are now seeing the biggest price increases.
To help FT readers, we are launching an FT personal inflation calculator in September. To demonstrate what it can do, we are asking readers to volunteer to tell us about their household budget and how it has changed.
So if you are willing to talk about your spending and put your figures through our number-crunching machine, please let us know. Email money@ft.com and we will get back to you.
Source: Economy - ft.com
