Welcome to the Stay Wealthy podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Schulte, and today I'm jumping in to quickly address the recent inflation report.

To grab the links and resources for this episode, just head over to you staywealthy.com forward slash 149.

So as you might have already seen, the March CPI report, the March inflation report,

was released this week and the year over year annual inflation rate jumped to a four-decade

high of 8.5%. As a reminder, these CPI reports, these inflation reports, they come out monthly

and they report the prior month's number,

which is then consolidated with the previous 12 months of reports to arrive at that

headline inflation rate that you see in the media. That's the 8.5% number that I just referenced.

That number is referencing the inflation rate for the time period March 2021 to March 22. The actual

CPI, the actual inflation rate for the month of March, which is often buried in these news

articles and hard to find, was 1.2%. And first in perspective, the CPI for February of this year was

0.8% and January was 0.6%. So inflation has certainly

jumped recently as anticipated. One report estimated that U.S. households are spending an extra

$327 per month due to the recent spike in inflation. And while this is the biggest monthly

jump in prices since

September of 2005 and the biggest year-over-year jump since 1981, there are some positives

that we can pull out of this report. For example, if you strip out food and energy from the

March report, inflation is actually slowing. And yes, food and energy are things that we all need to pay for in our daily life, but they're also more volatile. Their prices are more volatile. In other words, their prices tend to fluctuate and these big monthly swings don't typically stick around for the long term. On this note, chief economist at Ernst & Young said this week that given the pop in gasoline

prices here in March, these numbers are likely to represent something of a peak. While U.S. consumers

are likely more impacted by food and energy costs, the Fed is more focused on prices that are

sticky. The measurement of price stickiness is often referred to as core

inflation. And core inflation excludes food and energy prices. In March, core inflation rose

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