The Origin Story
RealInflation started as a simple exercise to answer one frustrating question: Why does the government's inflation rate feel so wrong?
A few years ago, the news kept reporting that inflation was stabilizing. But every time I went to the supermarket, the empirical reality was entirely different. Everyday items were visibly spiking in price, my energy bills were climbing, and at the end of every month, I found myself with significantly less "spare" money than I used to have.
The ONS "Average Basket" Problem
The official CPIH figure is calculated using a "basket" of hundreds of goods, assuming an "average" lifestyle. But I wasn't buying flat-screen TVs, gym memberships, or new cars every month. I was buying groceries, putting fuel in my car, and paying rent. The official metric was watering down the brutal price hikes of essential goods with the stagnant prices of luxury items I didn't buy.
I decided to calculate my actual personal inflation rate.
It turned into an exercise in pure frustration. Digging through the Office for National Statistics (ONS) website, downloading raw MM23 datasets, understanding how baseline index values from 2015 worked, mapping my budget to obscure COICOP codes (like `CP0112` for Meat), and reverse-engineering my marginal tax bracket just to figure out what gross salary I needed to ask for to break even.
It took hours of spreadsheet wrangling to get a single number. But when I finally got that number, it was a revelation. It validated everything I was feeling: my cost of living was higher than the headline rate - I wasn't imagining it after all.
Building a Better Tool
I built RealInflation so nobody else has to go through that spreadsheet nightmare.
The tool connects directly to the raw ONS backend data, strips out the noise of the "average basket", and lets you weight the inflation data against your exact lifestyle and income. It does the complex tax-trap math instantly, giving you a beautiful, personalized, and undeniable PDF report of your true financial reality.
Whether you are trying to budget better, or you need hard evidence to take into your next salary review, you deserve to know the real numbers.