What is Inflation ?

Inflation, is an economic concept. What the cause of inflation is, is not important to us from the point of view of this article. What is important to us is the effect of inflation! The effect of inflation is the prices of everything going up over the years.

A movie ticket was for a few paise in my dad’s time. Now it is worth Rs.50. My dads first salary for the month was Rs.400 and over he years it has now become Rs.75,000. This is what inflation is, the price of everything goes up. Because the price goes up, the salaries go up.

If you really thing about it, inflation makes the worth of money reduce. What you could buy in my dad’s time for Rs.10, now a days you will not be able to buy for Rs.400 also. The worth of money has reduced! If this is still not clear consider this, when my father was a kid, he used to get 50paise pocket money. He used to use this money to go and watch a movie (At that time you could watch a movie for 50paise!)

Now, just for the sake of understanding assume that my dad decided in his childhood to save 50paise thinking, that one day when he becomes big, he will go for a movie. Many years pass. The year now is 2006. My dad goes to the theater and asks for a ticket. He offers the ticket-booth-guy at the theater 50paise and asks for a ticket. The ticket booth guy says, “I am sorry sir, the ticket is worth Rs.50. You will not be able to even buy a “paan” with the 50paise!!”

The moral of the story is that, the worth of the 50paise reduced dramatically. 50paise could buy a whole lot when my dad was a kid. Now, 50paise can buy nothing. This is inflation. This tells us two important things.

Firstly: Do not keep your money stagnant. If you just save money by putting it your safe it will loose value over time. If you have Rs.1000 in your safe today and you keep it there for 10years or so, it will be worth a lot less after 10 years. If you can buy something for Rs.1000 today, you will probably require Rs.1500 to buy it 10 years from now. So do not keep money locked up in your safe.

Always invest money.

If you can’t think where to invest your money, then put it in a bank. Let it grow by gaining interest. But whatever you do, do not just lock your money up in your safe and keep it stagnant. If you do this, you will be loosing money without even knowing it. The more money you keep stagnant the more money you will be loosing.

Secondly: When investing, you have to make sure that the rate of return on your investment is higher than the rate of inflation.