📉 Inflation adjusted net worth/salary spreadsheet

TL;DR

You can copy the following spreadsheet and play around with the data yourself: PUBLIC: Inflation adjusted personal finance

If you, like me, enjoy watching number go up graphs, then you’ve probably also got some method of tracking basic financial metrics in a spreadsheet, or via some other sort of means.

Well, we are but simple creatures, and we do like to see number go up.

The thing is, the last few years have been a bit more, shall we say, tricky than normal years. The swinging 20’s have been at it again, with the following bargain bucket of little bombs being dropped on the economy in the last 4 years:

A Global Pandemic
Climate Emergency
Russo-Ukraine War
China-Taiwan escalation
Various shipping route disruptions
AI hysteria (this one has barely begun)

Overall, this spells for an atypical combination of over-demand and supply-restriction, that has lead to fairly shocking inflation figures in much of the world.

UK Inflation Data 1993-2023 — UK Inflation Data for the last 30 years. Source: ons.gov.uk

Whilst this is not entirely random on the scale of human history, this is certainly my first experience of meaningful inflation, and it coincides just nicely with the beginning of my professional career, so I’m left feeling a bit like Harold here.

A man who received a 3% now cries about runaway inflation — My thoughts exactly. Credit to Liz Farmer

Since I’m so unused to this, I thought I would humble myself and rebase my personal finance tracking, by inflation-adjusting all net-worth and salary data. The results were very insightful and only a little bit disheartening.

Now you can too!

The spreadsheet below allows you to calculate your own inflation adjusted data, however it is very UK focused, and I’m not entirely convinced my maths is correct, but it should be good-enough to grok whether you are on the right track or not.

Google Sheets PUBLIC: Inflation adjusted personal finance

All you need to do is copy the sheet to your own drive, and modify data under “Net Worth”. It will calculate your real-term (inflation adjusted) YoY (Year over Year) percentage growth. If you wish, you can even repurpose the data by replacing it with your salary!

This is probably slightly more depressing, as salary is sadly not cumulative.

And before you ask, no, these figures do not reflect my personal finances. I wish life were that simple.

Sources:

Office for National Statistics UK