Daily Expenses Balloon

You really have to drill down to see what is getting more expensive and what, if anything, is getting cheaper.

And like I said, the ONLY thing that got meaningfully cheaper is used cars, which doesn’t really help you on a daily basis.

Nobody I know buys a used car every day. But everyone I know uses energy on a daily basis.

That got more expensive, despite the much-publicized drop in the cost of a gallon of gas for your car (which was only 1.5% less than in December 2021)…

But if you’re talking about the energy we use to heat our homes, keep the lights on, and keep our food from going bad, then that got a lot more expensive:

And if you’re one of those people who likes to eat food every day, well, then your costs went up a lot too.

Both food at home and food away from home got way more expensive over the course of the year.

Literally every food category in your fridge or pantry that’s measured went up more than the top-line number of 6.5%:

Rotten to the Core

But you might also hear another number being tossed around in the coming weeks. That’s 5.7%, or the “core” CPI that excludes food and energy (because who uses those, anyway?)…

But don’t be fooled by that either. It’s not as pretty a picture as it seems once you drill down into the numbers.

Every single service in that measurement now costs more than it did the previous year:

The Bottom Line

Inflation is still raging hard and it’s not going away anytime soon.

It’s starting to look like the 3% we’ve shaved to get down from that high of 9.1% last June was the “easy” part.

Now, we’ve got 4% more to get down to the Fed’s target rate of 2%. And that’s going to take a lot of work.