Thursday, April 18, 2013

What Will $1 be Worth in the Future? (calculator)


This calculator:

  • Converts current prices to equivalent prices any number of years in the future
  • Compares purchasing power today to purchasing power in the future
Enter an amount, how far into the future you want to compute, and the inflation rate you want to assume.  Below we see that at 5% inflation for 20 years, an item that costs $100,000 now will cost over $265,000.  That means that 20 years from now the purchasing power of $100,000 will have been reduced by over 62%; $100,000 then will only be able to buy what we can buy now for about $37,000. Be sure to enter inflation percentages as decimal amounts -- that is, 0.05 for 5%, 0.025 for 2.5%, etc. 



Notes: Enter data only in the tan cells. On some phones you may need to double click to enter data. On some computers, you may have to enter some fields more than once for it to "take." Please leave a comment if you are having problems.