How Much Inflation Has Eaten Into a $10 Million Lifestyle in Just 5 Years
Written by
Andrew Lisa
Edited by
Zuri Anderson
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If you have an eight-figure lifestyle, you shouldn’t expect much sympathy from the paycheck-to-paycheck masses regarding the impact that rising prices have had on your quality of life.Â
Even so, the last five years have been unkind to America’s purchasing power, even among its most powerful purchasers. Here’s how much inflation has gnawed away at your $10 million lifestyle since October 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic set the spark for the fastest and highest inflation rates the country had experienced for 40 years.
5 Years of Rapidly Rising Prices
The Consumer Price Index (CPI), published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the basis for the official inflation rate. The most recent data from September shows a year-over-year rate of 2.9%, which is higher than the Fed’s longstanding 2% target, but much more forgiving than what consumers faced economy-wide in the post-pandemic era.Â
The following is a snapshot of five years of rising prices, using historical data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
- 2020: 1.2%
- 2021: 4.7%
- 2022: 8%
- 2023: 4.1%
- 2024: 2.9%
How a Dollar Diminishes Over the Years
Perpetually rising prices mean that a dollar never goes as far as it used to, especially during periods of accelerated inflation, like the economy experienced over the last five years.
Here’s a look at how much more you’d need to spend one year to get a dollar’s worth of goods from the prior year, starting in 2020.Â
- 2020: $1
- 2021: $1.05
- 2022: $1.13
- 2023: $1.18
- 2024: $1.21
- 2025: $1.25
In Short, $10 Million Isn’t What It Used To Be
The cumulative inflation rate over the last five years is 25.2%. So, what does that mean for your lavish and luxurious $10 million lifestyle? It means that you’d have to spend $12,517,860.52 to get what $10 million bought in 2020. Or, of course, you could do what average earners have been doing for the last half-decade — scale back, tighten your belt and make do with less.
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