You feel like everything is rising faster than the official numbers admit. This page explains where that gap comes from, what a “real” wage means as opposed to the figure on your payslip, and how to properly compare the price of a loaf fifteen years ago with today's.
Compare everyday prices → Opens the “Everyday Life” tab on moneyprinter.uk directlyWhat a product from back then would cost today if it had followed the consumer price index published by that zone's statistics office, exactly.
What that same product would cost if it had followed money supply growth over the same period. The gap between the two columns is usually the most revealing part.
Next to the two calculated benchmarks, the price you actually pay today. Three figures, and the gap becomes readable at a glance.
Your nominal wage is the number printed on the payslip. Your real wage is what that number can actually buy. The two can move in opposite directions.
A 2 % rise in a year when prices climb 4 % is, in practice, a loss of roughly 2 % in purchasing power. The payslip figure went up all the same, which makes the loss hard to notice at the time.
That is why the minimum wage sits in the basket the site tracks, alongside bread and a litre of fuel: it shows whether the income floor kept pace with the prices it is meant to cover.
The consumer price index measures an average basket, weighted by the spending pattern of a typical household. Your basket is not that average basket.
If you drive a lot, rent in a tight housing market, or have young children, your personal inflation can diverge sharply from the national average. Conversely, the index includes categories whose prices fall, such as electronics, dragging the average down in ways you never feel.
There is also a well-documented attention bias: we remember the prices of things we buy often and pay for directly, typically bread, coffee or fuel, far better than rare purchases. Those high-frequency items have risen faster than the average in recent years, which mechanically sharpens the sense of a mismatch.
None of this means the official index is wrong. It simply answers a different question from the one you are asking in the aisle.
For every item in the basket, the site shows two projections next to the real price: one following official inflation, the other following money creation.
The second is almost always higher than the first. That gap is not an error: it reflects the fact that part of the money created never washed into everyday consumer goods, but into property and financial assets, whose prices are not counted in the price index.
Reading both together gives a more honest picture than either figure alone. The first tells you what happened to the shopping trolley. The second tells you what happened to the currency itself.
The prices shown are representative orders of magnitude, not till receipts. A coffee does not cost the same in a Paris bar and in a village, and the average matches nobody exactly.
What the table does capture correctly is not the absolute price but the movement: the ratio between then and now, and the gap between what the price actually did and what it would have done under each of the two reference paces. That comparison is what carries meaning, not the raw value in any single cell.
Yes. The Everyday Life tab has a panel where you enter an item's name and its current price. It is then treated like the other basket items: compared against the pace of money creation, against official inflation, and against the work time needed to buy it.
It restates a price as working time at the zone's minimum wage. The point is to compare two eras without going through money at all: if an item costs fewer minutes of work than before, it has genuinely become more affordable, whatever inflation did. If the reverse is true, its rise outpaced the lowest incomes.
Because part of the money created did not flow into everyday consumer goods but into property and financial assets, whose prices are not included in the consumer price index. The gap between the two projections makes that divergence visible.
No, they are representative orders of magnitude. What the table measures correctly is the movement over time and the gap against the two reference paces, not the absolute price of an item in one particular place.