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You probably remember what a gallon of gas cost in 1990. About $1.15. Maybe you remember ground beef at $1.60 a pound, or a new Ford F-150 for around $13,000. Those numbers feel like a different country. They’re not. They’re the same country—with a dollar that’s been slowly hollowed out from the inside.
Most people think of inflation as something that happened in 2022 and 2023—the big spike everyone noticed. And they’re not wrong. Prices did jump. But that spike was just the loud part. The real damage started decades earlier and never stopped. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says your dollar has lost about 62% of its purchasing power since 1990. Not because of one bad year. Because of 3%... year after year after year.
Now here’s what most people get wrong. They look at the CPI—the government’s overall inflation number—and think that tells the whole story. It doesn’t. The CPI says prices are up about 2.6 times since 1990. But hospital costs? Those are up over 4 times. College tuition? 3.6 times. A new pickup truck? Over 3 times. The stuff that actually matters to a family—healthcare, education, housing—has been running well ahead of the “official” number for three decades.
And here’s the part that really gets me. If you retired in 2000 with a million dollars and kept it in bonds or a money market, you probably thought you were being safe. Conservative. Responsible. Instead, you got hit with 3% to 4% annual erosion... for 26 years. That million buys what $530,000 would have bought when you retired. You didn’t spend it. You didn’t lose it in the market. It just... shrank.
This is why I keep saying: cash is not “safe.” It feels safe. It sits there. It doesn’t go down on a screen. But every single year, it buys you a little less. The chart above tells that story better than I can. A dollar from 1990 is now worth about 38 cents.
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