Your Personal Inflation Calculator

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right now, we welcome Parker Shepherd of the program Heritage Foundation,
and Parker is the director of the Center for Data
Analysis at Heritage, and they have a new widget that
may well be useful if you're feeling the pinch of inflation. Parker,
Good morning, morning Gary, Welcome to the kfab is good
they have you on. We think, as you point out,

(00:23):
we hear all these indexes and it can feel a
little abstract, but it's really not. As a matter of fact,
according to an analysis by a Congressional Joint Economic Committee,
as of August, voters in battleground states are paying about
one thousand dollars more per month for the same collection

(00:44):
of goods and services compared to January of twenty twenty one.
This will be a factor, I believe, the biggest one
in the election. But you guys have come up with
an actual calculator the real people can use, right Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
I think that the number is a good number and
that matches what we've seen and the averages with our tool.
But with our tool, you're not limited to just the average.
You can put in your exact budget and find out
what the change in the cost of living is for
everything that you're buying specifically. You don't have to just
take one number that's already calculated for you. You get

(01:20):
something that's the work's done for you, and they'll tell
you exactly how many more dollars per month you're spending
just to buy the same goods and services.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
What how does it work? In other words, is it
is it customizable for things beyond things you buy in
the store? Can you calculate your insurance and issues like that?

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yes, it's pretty simple to walk through. You can go
you can get data. It's tailored specifically to your location.
So if you want to use the US average, you
can do that. If you want to go to like
the Midwest or even the west north central region that
includes Nebraska, you can do that too. And then you
have eight different categories groceries, restaurants, renter, mortgage, electricity, gasoline,

(02:09):
car payments, car insurance or other. And if you want to,
you can break that down that other down into more detail.
But if you can, if you have a budget already
set out with those eight categories, you just put in
what you're spending currently each month, Take a month that
you want to compare to, and it'll show you what
the dollar costs difference is between now.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
And the past could be very useful. Did you see
the numbers, Parker on on consumer debt. It's pretty scary
as a record now five point one trillion I had
ahead in July.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, I think that's a big trend to follow on
the looking at excess savings, where in a pandemic, we
saw the government printing up a bunch of money and
passing it around to people and that was a major
driver of in place. People had a lot of income
that was coming in, but no no real place to

(03:05):
spend it, and so you had all this excess saving
that was built up, and we've been steadily drawing it
down over the course of the pandemic. And now it's
getting to the point where that money has a run out.
There's nowhere else left to go, and it's really touching
people's budgets.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, Parker Shepherd here from Heritage. So is this an
online you have to go on your computer to use it,
or is it an app you can download or how
does it work?

Speaker 2 (03:34):
No, it's a website. You can get to it from
your desktop, you can get to it from your mobile phone.
All you have to do is go to myinflation dot Com.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Excellent, Parker. Thanks have a great weekend. Thanks you too,
you'd be I appreciate you spending some time, Parker Shepherd
from Heritage Foundation. That might be not only eye opening,
but it could be useful and say, Okay, I got
to cut back here because this right here is killing me,
or I got to move. Don't move, we don't want
although if you do move, you can take us with

(04:03):
you the iHeartRadio app. Again, that is myinflation dot com
if you want to check that out and customize what
the high costs of living are doing to you specific
to your situation and in our area.