How to Use Truflation’s Personal Inflation Calculator to Get a Raise

Are you overworked and underpaid?

Welcome to the club.

More than half of all workers believe they’re underpaid, with the rising cost of living cited as the greatest cause of this problem. If you find yourself in that predicament, blessed with a job but cursed with the inability to make your paycheck stretch enough to pay your bills, you’re not alone.

You’re not helpless, either.

If you’re as good at your job as you believe you are, and your boss would be sorry to see you go, perhaps it’s time to request a pay raise. But like other key life moments – seeking a date; proposing marriage; confessing a secret – there’s a right way to go about it.

It’s one thing to want a raise. It’s another one to get it. Approaching your boss with evidence on your side will significantly increase your chances of securing the pay raise you merit.

To provide incontrovertible evidence that your income is being eroded in real-time, we’ve developed the Truflation Personal Inflation Calculator.

We’ll explain how this personal CPI inflation calculator works and how to use it to determine the salary you need to make up the difference.

Determining How Inflation Effects You

Evidence of inflation is all around: groceries, haircuts, gym memberships, ... even streaming subscriptions (not to mention the cost of gas, loan repayments, and college fees). Everything is going up, except for your take-home pay. But feelings aren’t enough: you need facts – cold, hard facts that will allow you to quantify the extent to which inflation is effecting your household.

The Truflation Personal Inflation Calculator is designed to put a clear price on inflation as it impacts your earnings and outgoings. Enter your income, expenses, and salary, and the US inflation calculator will take care of the rest, working out the extent to which inflation is deleteriously effecting your bank balance. Not only is this helpful in identifying areas in which you should cut expenditure, but it will furnish you with a case to support a pay raise.

The whole process can be completed in just two minutes, and its findings can make a material difference to your quality of life. First, make a note of your monthly household expenses by category. Then enter them into the Personal Inflation Calculator, and it will work out how much your salary should be. 

Getting Started With the Personal Inflation Calculator

The Truflation Inflation Calculator is designed for US households primarily, but it can also be applied to the UK. Before you begin entering your personal details, you may find it useful to get a baseline on how inflation is impacting the average household. To do so, select a demographic from the dropdown menu. The calculator will then input a corresponding salary and typical expenses per category before generating inflation results.

For example, a US urban professional will receive an average salary of $45,000, which works out at $3,750 per month. But as the inflation calculator shows, their typical monthly outgoings total $3,653. That leaves less than 100 bucks to play with at the end of the month; not much hope of saving or planning a trip when you’re operating that close to the breadline. 

The inflation calculator will display four outputs that determine the effect inflation has on the selected demographic:

• Household personal inflation rate (%)
• Estimated increase in monthly spending ($)
• Effective pay reduction due to inflation ($)
• Salary you should receive to mitigate this ($)

This information is helpful in seeing the extent to which inflation impacts different households. But more importantly, it’s very helpful in calculating its impact on your lifestyle in real terms. Furnished with these facts, you will have all the information you need to request a pay raise rather than simply mumbling something about “cost of living.” The clearer you can delineate the problem, the likelier you are to find the solution.

Customizing Your Personal Inflation Calculator

When you’re ready to input your own data, hit the Reset button at the bottom of the page to clear the fields. Then enter your own salary before working your way through the list titled Customize Expenses, inputting the data as accurately as possible.

To help you gauge what’s “normal” for the demographic you’ve selected, whose income should roughly match yours, the US average spend for that earning group is displayed for each category. Of course, real expenditure across these categories will vary greatly between households, so don’t worry if your own outgoings break down very differently.

The calculator is only as accurate as the data that’s inputted, so try to be as accurate as possible when calculating your household expenditures. If 20% of your expenses are going on alcohol & tobacco, of course, you don’t need to share that tidbit with your boss: just show them the final results derived from all outgoings.

If there’s a category that doesn’t apply to you, set it to zero. And if there are expenses whose categorization you’re unsure of, place them into Others. The most important thing is that your total outgoings are a true representation of the expenses you face on an average month. When you’ve completed all fields, press Calculate, and Truflation’s Inflation Calculator will display the results.

Allowing for Future Inflation

With the cost of many goods and services expected to rise further over the next year, you can also use the tool as a future inflation calculator. This will allow you to work out how much worse off you’ll be financially if inflation rises but your salary remains static. Depending on your circumstances, you’ll probably find you’re between 1.8 and 2.2% worse off through inflation as it stands. If that’s the case, you’ve got all the proof you need to present an argument for a pay raise.

You might have data on your side, but you’ll still need to ask in the right way and at the right time. Pick a week where your performance has been on point, and you stand a good chance of securing the raise your household deserves.

Want to get the pay you deserve? Head to Truflation’s personal inflation calculator now!