What is Your Money Worth Today?
As you’re walking through the checkout line at the grocery store or handing over your credit card for that $70.00 tank of gas, you may be wondering if we as consumers are better or worse off than we were say 5 or 10 years ago?
We wondered too, and did a little research.
We found a great website: Measuring Worth, which published by the Institute for the Measurement of Worth, a nonprofit whose mission it is to “make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal measures.”
Basically, to tell us how much things are worth today compared to yesterday.
The site has some excellent calculators that can tell you everything from the relative values of the US dollar to annualized growth rates to purchasing power and more. You’ll find everything you ever wanted to know and more about how much your dollars are worth.
For fun, we used the Measuring Worth calculators to see how much money you would need today in order to have the equivalent of $100 say 5, 10, 25 and 50 years ago? (According to the site, current data is not yet available for 2008, but we can still compare recent 2007 figures to historical ones.)
Here are the numbers. To have the same “purchase power” as $100 just
• 5 years ago, you would need $115.25 in the year 2007
• 10 years ago, you would need $129.19 in the year 2007
• 25 years ago, you would need $214.86 in the year 2007
• 50 years ago, you would need $736.56 in the year 2007
For more information on how the “Purchase Power of Money” is computed, or if you want to read more about the changing value of money, go to www.measuringworth.com.
Are you feeling the squeeze? We want to know. Leave us your comments on how far you feel your money goes today compared to 5 years ago.
