A dollar today won't buy a dollar's worth of stuff tomorrow. Travel forward in time and see what your money will actually be worth.
We use the standard compound inflation formula: future cost = today's price × (1 + rate)years. The "today's $1 worth" stat is the inverse, showing how much purchasing power one of today's dollars holds in the future.
Inflation isn't loud. It doesn't show up on a bill. But over a working lifetime, it quietly cuts what your money can do, and most people don't plan for it.
The US dollar has lost roughly 96% of its purchasing power since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking CPI in 1913. The same dollar that bought a meal then buys a few cents of groceries today. Source: BLS Inflation Calculator.
Inflation is the rate at which prices rise across the economy. When inflation runs at 3%, a basket of goods that costs $100 today costs about $103 a year from now.
Your salary, your savings, and your investments all have to outrun it just to stay in place.
Divide 72 by the inflation rate and you get the rough number of years for prices to double, or for cash to lose half its value.
At 3%, that's about 24 years. At 6%, just 12. A savings account earning 0% interest is steadily melting in the background.
The S&P 500 has returned roughly 10% per year on average over the last century, per S&P data, well above long-run inflation.
You can't stop inflation. You just need your money working somewhere that grows faster than prices do.