Quote from Savings Beagle on December 17, 2021, 9:36 am

In the article "Millions of American Households Face $3,500 Additional Expenses This Year as Inflation Soars" Katabella Roberts, the author, does a very good job highlighting how much the U.S.'s current inflation situation is impacting the budgets of households across the income spectrum.

The piece also touches on the Federal Reserve Bank's latest, and expected, actions to try and arrest the increased inflation rates and somewhat normalize its policies after over a decade of manipulating the U.S. economy via its bond-buying and extremely low interest rate policies.

And, finishes with a quick look at America's debt situation and Congress' recent actions to add even more to our unsustainable debt levels.

Below is the first part of the article with a link to read the remainder.

Surging inflation will cost millions of Americans more than $3,000 in additional expenses this year, according to a Penn Wharton University of Pennsylvania Budget Model (PWBM) analysis published on Wednesday.

PWBM, a nonpartisan research-based initiative, estimates that the historic levels of inflation will require the average U.S. household to spend around $3,500 more in 2021 to achieve the same level of consumption of goods and services as in 2019 or 2020.

Moreover, PWBM estimates that lower-income households spend more of their budget on goods and services that have been more impacted by inflation, and will have to spend roughly 7 percent more on such goods and services, while higher-income households will have to spend about 6 percent more.

PWBM came to the estimates by using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE), a nationwide household survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the November 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index (CPI) to investigate how much price changes increase the expenditure for households at different income levels.

They analyzed the increased costs under the assumption that consumption patterns among households would remain the same this year as in 2020 and 2019.

For example, between November 2020 and November 2021, the bottom 20 percent spent $309 more on food, $761 more on energy, $476 more on shelter, $390 on other commodities, and $224 on other services.

Meanwhile, the higher-income households spent an additional $961 on food, $1,824 on energy, $1,607 on shelter, $2,144 on other commodities, and $1,100 on other services.

That could mean, based on 2020 total consumption expenditure data, that the bottom 20 percent of income-earners saw their consumption expenditure increase by 6.8 percent to $2,160 per household, while the top 5 percent saw an increase of 6.1 percent or roughly $7,636 per household. Middle-income earners also saw an increase of 6.8 percent, or roughly $4,351, as per the data.

Read the full article here.

How about you?  Are you seeing a hit to your budget similar to what's outlined by this study?