The Actual Amount Inflation Is Costing Consumers Per Month
As of December 2022, inflation is costing individuals an average of $371 additional per month to live.
The American family’s buying power has been decreasing for over a year due to a period of intense inflation. Beyond the standard definition, most people don’t really know what exactly inflation is costing consumers on a monthly basis and the answer for the month of December was $371 extra to live with all the same purchases from the prior month.
This number is down from its peak in June when we were paying an additional $502 a month for the same goods and services. Let’s break this number down even further to see which goods and services are seeing the largest increases. American households are spending an estimated $82.60 more on their homes and an additional $72.01 on food. According to CNN Business quoting the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Americans spent 11.8% more on groceries than a year ago. Egg prices have spiked by nearly 60% over the past year, the biggest annual increase since 1973, in part due to a supply crunch caused by avian flu.”
Some of the other areas that are hitting us in our wallets are our cost of alcoholic beverages by $2.67 per month, health care costs are up $17.97 per month, household utilities are up $47.33, and family entertainment is up $15.27 per month. There is one area that traditionally is complained about as always costing more than people feel it should cost and right now it is saving us money monthly and that is the cost of gasoline. I know that is a shocking revelation and it is saving us $1.55 per month and helping reduce the overall cost of inflation.
On the bright side, the overall total cost to us consumers has been reducing in recent months because wages are slowly starting to catch up to the product cost increases. However, even those product cost increases are slowing down, and in December 2022 the increase only rose 6.5% over December 2021 which was the smallest increase in product cost since October 2021. This could be construed as a positive sign that the increases will be slowing year over year going forward and hopefully be confirmed when January 2023 data is released.
This would be a welcomed change by the American public as the toll of inflation has impacted families that had to make tough decisions on what goods and services they could live without as they waited for inflation to stabilize. As a new year is upon us, we are keeping our chins up and trying to grind through these tough economic times that have taken the once-strong buying power of our currency and reduced it by a lot. We can only hope that like in past eras of inflation eventually the tide turns and the American dollar can once again strengthen and have us back on the road to economic prosperity.
