We’ve written a new piece for the Emma blog about calculating your Personal Inflation Rate.
i.e how much you’ve spent in one year / how much you’ve spent in a previous year
I think understanding your personal inflation rate is helpful because it highlights if you’ve gradually started spending more money - something that might be hard to spot if you only review your spending month by month
I was explaining inflation to my better half after he mentioned his phone bill was being increased.
He now understands why I calculate higher rent after 12 months of living somewhere as it’s always in my rental agreements.
Being able to predict some of this (rent, phone providers) is amazing, but ensuring you don’t forget the inflation at random (Netflix price increase, your increased use on hand wash over the year…) is so important.
I love a spreadsheet (why I’m not single I don’t know) and so was able to plot the increased future costs of hot water (communal hot water sucks!) based on average usage, when they increased the gas and management fees by a few pence.
Interesting idea. If the analytics tab allowed you to change the period you were looking at then it would be pretty easy to calculate this yourself in Emma. I think it would be a cool feature to add, though not if it just showed you one number in an annual report without letting you drill down to actually understand it.
I was thinking it might be a cool thing to add to the Year In Emma report, but you’re right that everyone would probably want to drill down into more info
Looking at personal inflation rate by category would be interesting, but then is by month by category a bit much?
