Ask HN: Is Inflation Affecting You?

No, I inflation-proofed my lifestyle as soon as I could with a house, solar panels, a cheap hybrid car, and a taste for cheap, healthy, basic food (rice, beans, salad, water).

Yes, I had to move for a job this year and the rent is basically unsustainable. I went from paying $500 a month to paying $1500 a month. After taxes, that's half my pay. I know that it's not exactly all the fault of inflation. The town I was moving from is very poor, whereas this one is a little more well-off, but even two years ago a similar apartment would have been around $800. The real killer is cars, though. I'm driving a 20 year old car and I'm terrified of it not working, because I simply can't afford to buy another car with the way inflation has changed the price of cars. All I can think about is once this car dies, there's no hope. This is my first time having a middle-class $65k IT salary and I feel less wealthy than I was as a starving artist 10 years ago.

I almost told my job that I simply couldn't do it because of housing and suspect we are leading into catastrophic employment shortage. Similar to how the climate is cooled temporarily by short-term weather patterns, I think our society will be temporarily "saved" by the recession, but when the economy starts running back at full there will be regions where you simply can't hire people to do certain jobs and any executives who cut jobs now will actually bankrupt their entire business a few years from now. I resent the situation I'm in every single day and do not feel like the extra work and responsibility is worth the compensation. I dream every day of being laid-off and will gladly walk away from the whole thing once my contract is up. There needs to be incentive to continue and I just don't really see that any longer.

I’m in full agreement with you and this is something I talked about before the 2009 implosion as well.

I’ve received a couple of job offers in San Jose for positions that require a significant education and skill but won’t even cover a mortgage once everything is taken into account. I really think they will either be forced to raise their offers or hire a dwindling pool of already established locals.

I wouldn't say we're struggling to make ends meet. But we have to think about our budget more. Before we could eat out a couple times per week, give all the extra curricular activities our kids wanted to them, we were able to save for our kids' future college, and have a decent sized discretionary spending amount that we could spend on random stuff in any given month.

Now we eat out 0 times per month. Kids are limited to 1 recurring activity at a time. Our discretionary budget is basically $0.

Every other week my dad and some of his friends go out to dinner on thursday. Each time a different person picks the restaurant and buys. This week was my turn. I picked a nice steak house that recently changed owners and completely remodeled. It is local to where I live and has been getting good reviews. It was expensive and on the upper end, so the ~$350 bill for 4 people didn't really come as too much of a surprise.

One of us ordered steak and what surprised me most was that his plate came completely bare with just a lob of steak on it. Not even a tiny bit of garnish to decorate the plate with. I tried a bit of the steak and it was delicious, so maybe they just expected it to speak for itself, or was that a result of inflation? You tell me.