No Inflation? My Ass!

Literally. My ass dis­agrees.

I was in the mid­dle of my morn­ing rou­tine, when I noticed.

I had reached for a new role of toi­let paper, tore off the req­ui­site 4 squares, & fold­ed it just right. But just as I went to use my lit­tle origa­mi mas­ter­piece, the world as I knew it was flushed.

Fast on my feet, even ear­ly in the morn­ing, I reached for the old paper tube (dis­card­ed on the floor so I could take it to the recy­cle bin) and held it up against the new role. My eyes con­firmed what my ass already knew. Toilet paper infla­tion has cut the width of my role by at least a quar­ter inch.

Interestingly, and way more dis­turb­ing ((I have a very dif­fi­cult time with being touched by strangers, unavoid­able on air­planes, but with so lit­tle per­son­al space it’s excru­ci­at­ing men­tal­ly for me to sit in these way-too-nar­row seats.)), was an arti­cle in the Wall Street Journal ana­lyz­ing air­plane seat width I read just pri­or to this dis­cov­ery.

What does this have to do with build­ing wealth?

It’s a real-world demon­stra­tion of infla­tion. Even if the report­ed infla­tion num­bers are low, we’re still expe­ri­enc­ing “get­ting less for the same amount of mon­ey” across a wide vari­ety of non-dis­cre­tionary items.

Hold On a Second Dave! Airfare is not non-discretionary.

You may not think of air­fare as non-dis­cre­tionary. Technically, you’d be cor­rect.

However, I know that when I retire I’m going to want to be able to fly to vis­it my chil­dren. And my grand­chil­dren. I might like to trav­el and expe­ri­ence some new places. So while tech­ni­cal­ly dis­cre­tionary, the future we see for our­selves (in retire­ment, or before then) prob­a­bly includes enjoy­ing the fruits of our labors. That enjoy­ment will cost mon­ey. Money you won’t have if you think of being wealthy as the size of your pay­check, and your pay­check does­n’t keep up with infla­tion.

What is Measured Matters & You Need to Take Responsibility

In a com­pli­cat­ed world, you need to take some mea­sure of respon­si­bil­i­ty and under­stand when some­one is giv­ing you a line of shit. The banks total­ly took advan­tage of peo­ple with the whole mort­gage thing, but… I strong­ly believe that peo­ple should have tak­en more respon­si­bil­i­ty to under­stand what would mean when their ARM start­ed to adjust. The huge inter­est pay­ment increas­es should have been expect­ed, and at some point they should have asked them­selves “what if I can’t refi­nance again at that point in time?”

It’s the same thing for retire­ment plan­ning. We see (and feel) the effects of infla­tion and if we’re pay­ing atten­tion real­ize that costs are going up more than the per­cent­age point or two the gov­ern­ment reports. We can ignore the future impact of these increas­es, but they’re just as real as those ARM adjust­ments. And, it’s going to be equal­ly ugly finan­cial­ly and too late in life to recov­er.

Inflation, real-world infla­tion like my ass noticed this morn­ing, is real. It will have a real impact on the qual­i­ty of our lives as we shift our pri­or­i­ties from work to “slow­ing down”, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing our stag­nant wages (and anoth­er ref­er­ence about how the typ­i­cal American fam­i­ly makes less than it did in 1989). If you want to be able to enjoy some mea­sure of lux­u­ry ((Is vis­it­ing your fam­i­ly a lux­u­ry? Where are our val­ues if that’s the case?)) you must build wealth over time with a blue­print like the Elephant’s Paycheck.