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Jestre's avatar

Not wrong, just switching the metric. Month to month vs year to year. The problem is both are wild underestimates of how inflation impacts most people in terms of purchasing power. 0% MtM inflation isn't exactly something to celebrate as the prices become permanent fixtures in people's lives.

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

Yup.

Ask the family of four trying to meet ends. The mean income of a family of four is just under $80k.

I hope those folks are ANGRY.

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SomeDude's avatar

80K? That's close to 4x the maximum income I've ever had for a family of four.

I could live /well/ on that. Pay off my house in a single year with the surplus over the minimum of what is needed to actually live on.

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

So you live off $20,000 per year and have a family?

You are definitely better than most with budgeting and finding creative ways to save money.

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SomeDude's avatar

I currently support myself completely and my son half time on 13K a year, since the scamdemic dropped my job to half time hours or less for the last two and a half years. Between 2007 and 2017, I made under 20K yearly ($10/hr or less) and had no issues supporting a family of four.

My idea of budgeting is paying for housing, utilities, food, fuel, and house/auto insurance first then any money left over is spendable or saveable.

There's no creativity about it... When one has never in a half century lived outside of the poverty-line level socio-economic caste, you learn not to waste money on expensive things that aren't crucial and to reduce/reuse and buy used instead of new whenever possible.

My main savings is not paying rent. The creativity would apply to locating owner-financed housing for purchase because banks hate my level of income.

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Gathering Goateggs's avatar

There are several good reasons that prices year over year are used to express inflation metrics; one is that it's the easiest way to remove seasonality without having to resort to a lot of fancy autocorrelation error corrections.

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Jestre's avatar

Yes, YoY is obviously better. Both are flawed. But it is common parlance (albeit less common than YoY) to use MtM inflation numbers as well.

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