Inflation to a twenty-something
As Marketplace celebrates its 25th birthday this year, we are looking at the surprising, sometimes delightful and sometimes destructive ways that prices have changed during that quarter century.
And like many of the twenty-something variety, we decided to mark the occasion by taking a selfie…of our spending. Enter the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
Rather than looking at costs and pricing, the CE looks at how much consumers spent, on average, on any given item or service that year. It’s compiled from two sources: the Interview Survey, and the Diary Survey. The former checks in with consumers on quarterly basis, monitoring larger expenditures (like rent and costs related to vehicles), while the latter asks people to keep a spending diary over a shorter period of time to catch smaller, day-to-day purchases.
Together, they create a picture of the spending habits of consumers during a given year. Among other things, the CE is used to revise the Consumer Price Index by looking at goods and their “relative importance.” And as we’ve explored elsewhere, putting together that “basket of goods” that determines inflation is a tricky process that some feel hasn’t been handled well in the past.
Regardless, looking at CEs from two years provides interesting comparisons of how much and where we spend our money.
So now that Marketplace is in its twenties, how does our spending compare to a twenty-something from 1989?
Adjusted for inflation (think 2013 dollars), here’s how much income consumers 25 to 34 years of age made versus how much they spent on rent, food, alcohol, clothing, and shoes in 1989 and 2013.
It’s worth noting that the CE gets incredibly specific. For example, this same age group spent $174 on “cereals and cereal products” in 2013, whereas their 1989 counterparts spent $233 in the same category. Amounts spent on health insurance are also available ($601 in 1989, $1,334 in 2013), which will be an especially interesting comparison to revisit when the CE for 2014 is released, as the Affordable Care Act will have been in effect for this demographic.
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