Where is all your money going?: Kashyap Kompella takes a look at personal inflation

Using grocery bills from across five years, see how different the experienced rate of inflation is, from the official one – and take a look at why.

We are, each of us, feeling the slow boil.

(HT Illustration: Rahul Pakarath)

Inflation is one of modern life’s inevitabilities, as certain as time itself (or death and taxes). Prices rise, currencies thin, and what once bought a quick mid-day sandwich is now barely enough for just the bread.

This quiet creep has become woven into the order of things; an extra layer of tax on already-taxed money. It eats quietly through every wallet: rich, poor and those in-between.

The poor feel it first and hardest; every rise in prices chips away at necessities, not choices. The middle-class watch savings shrink. The affluent can hold out longer and smile through the squeeze, but eventually everyone feels the erosion, not just of wealth, but of certainty.

SALT IN THE SYSTEM

A little inflation is considered healthy because it signals that demand is alive, and production is expanding. As the economist John Maynard Keynes put it, mild inflation reflects an economy realising its potential. It is a component in the engine of growth.

Companies can continue to inch prices upward because people are steadily earning, spending and investing more.

Zero inflation, by contrast, points to stagnation: weak demand, falling profits, idle capacity. When prices don’t move, neither do wages; new ideas do not reach fruition.

Economists such as Keynes and James Tobin argued that modest inflation greases the wheels of the labour market. It lets real wages adjust without outright pay cuts, keeping employment stable.

For this reason, central banks target inflation rates of up to 4%. That is seen as high enough to encourage borrowing and enterprise, but low enough to preserve trust (in the economy and in money).

A little inflation, then, is like salt in one’s food. Overdone, it can overwhelm the system, adding a bad aftertaste to each meal.

BILLS OF FARE

How is inflation measured?

The government tracks average price rise across different sectors (food, fuel, housing, healthcare, as well as other key goods and services).

There are different consumer price indices (CPIs): for rural areas and urban areas (as well as a combined one); for industrial workers (IW); for agriculture labour and rural labour (AL / RL). Each serves a different purpose. The Reserve Bank of India uses CPI - Combined, which is also the headline inflation measure, as its target metric. CPI-IW forms the basis of dearness allowance revisions. CPI-AL and CPI-RL are used to set minimum wages for rural workers.

Consumer inflation, around the world, tends to be primarily food-led. This is also the area in which most consumers feel the price increases most keenly. But each person’s spending mix is unique, which means that each of us also experiences inflation differently.

A family feels it in groceries and rent, a caregiver in hospital and nursing fees, a student feels it in fees. That is your personal inflation index, the private arithmetic of each life. It shows how far your rupee stretches, regardless of the headlines.

Where the official figures indicate direction, the individual wallet reflects reality.

So, in the end, official inflation is a broad map. Each life represents the actual terrain.

MENU OPTIONS

What does true inflation look like for an urban household today?

For many, including mine (and we are statistically part of the top 1% in India, as is much of the upper-middle-class), grocery and quick-commerce apps have become the default mode of shopping for household items. The habit took root in the Covid-19 lockdowns, and has stuck.

We’ve been regulars on one big-name platform since 2019.

For the purposes of this analysis, I reviewed nearly 400 orders over five years, to track price changes and build a household-level index. Prices include the convenience premium of home delivery along with effects of discounts and promotions. Our brand choices have stayed consistent, allowing for like-to-like comparisons. Our purchases aren’t extravagant but are not the lowest-priced either.

Vegetables are excluded for being too variable, and forming only a small share of our household budget. What emerges is a snapshot of the experience of price rise for one Bengaluru family of four (my wife and I, our daughter and my mother).

Within our basket, a pattern stands out: proteins rise faster than carbohydrates. The cost of items such as paneer, avocados and even our oat-and-almond cookies has climbed sharply, while staples such as flour, sugar, butter and tea have stayed stable. In other words, the essentials that pack in nutrition cost more each year and, perversely, the fillers are more affordable.

Orange prices have risen by over 19% each year; paneer by over 18%; shampoo by nearly 13% and toothpaste by nearly 12%.

Overall, for my family’s basket of 40 items, we have experienced an inflation rate of 8.1% per annum, against official consumer price inflation rates of under 5%. (See the charts below for a more detailed breakdown.)

Details will vary but I am reasonably sure that, if you were to conduct such an exercise, your personal inflation number would be much higher than headline inflation too.

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BEYOND THE BASKET

Even that isn’t the full picture.

For most of us, groceries make up a small portion of monthly spending. The heavier hits come from larger recurring expenses such as rent, school fees and fuel. Here, prices have risen faster and stayed high.

School fees and transport costs have climbed sharply (see charts alongside), rising well above headline inflation year after year. Healthcare costs have moved steadily upward, including for routine consultations. Rental rates, which had plateaued during the pandemic, have shot up amid the return-to-office wave.

In the leisure space, or the spending that lies beyond these necessities, the same pattern holds.

Eating out, flight tickets and clothing all show price jumps that outpace the national inflation rate. These are the everyday markers of an economy growing in numbers overall but stretching the household budgets (of even the top-quartile) in real terms.

This is the lived reality of inflation that no national index can fully capture.

What explains the divergence of official and personal inflation rates?

To be sure, the CPI indices have some frozen-in-time elements, reflecting a base year and basket from 2011; in 2026, this will be updated to a 2024 base year. My hypothesis is that the differences for the premium segment arise for a few other reasons too. These include a greater capacity to absorb price hikes, which leads to slower substitution or switching; as well as limited price-shaping actions by the government (central and state interventions and subsidies are focused, rightly so, on the tiers below).

THE ILLUSION OF MOTION

What does it mean for us, that the rate we think we’re coping with is not the true figure at all?

Well, inflation can multiply mirages.

Ignore it, and one feels richer as salaries inch upward. But salaries in the private sector are often pegged to official inflation rates, so we are losing value to a kind of erosion there too.

The result is a sort of treadmill economy: motion without progress, effort without gain.

Over time, this leads to an attrition of lifestyle or standards of living, even for many statistically within the 1%.

You’ve probably noticed it: the pause before a purchase, the self-enforced downgrades (wait for a cheaper flight rate, pick a hotel with fewer stars for the family holiday, revive the car log to figure out where the fuel is going). For the top 1%, these remain champagne problems. Step into the vast majority that lives below this line and the decision-making becomes increasingly bleak.

FLIGHT PATHS

Like all analyses, mine is incomplete because it looks only at spending and consumption. The full picture includes assets, savings and wealth, which move differently and can offset or amplify inflation’s impact. Nonetheless, everyday expenses remain a good mirror of how one’s money can be expected to hold up against time.

For a sense of how you fare, do the math. See how many years of post-tax income it takes to buy a home or a car, or to fund a child’s education, and one can gauge how one’s income measures up against the true inflation in one’s world. When that multiple widens, it means wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living.

Economists call these real affordability ratios: house price-to-income, tuition-to-income, rent-to-salary. They show whether prosperity is genuine or whether that is part-illusion too (caused by the simple factor of vastly unequal distribution).

The trick, for the individual, isn’t to spend less in order to beat inflation; the way forward is to figure out how to keep those personal ratios from drifting out of the green.

It is worth reiterating: this is where we stand, those of us fortunate enough to be near the top of the pyramid.

(Kashyap Kompella is a tech industry analyst and author of two books on AI)