Pull a crisp $100 bill from a drawer where it sat since the year 2000. The number on it hasn't changed. What it buys has changed enormously. To purchase the same basket of groceries, gas, and rent that $100 covered in 2000, you'd need roughly $185 today. The bill didn't shrink. The dollar did. That's inflation, and this calculator shows you exactly how much it has taken.

Here's the part most people miss: inflation isn't a one-time event you read about in the news. It compounds, quietly, every single year. An average rate of 3% a year sounds mild. But run it forward and it cuts your money's purchasing power roughly in half over 24 years. The same loaf of bread that cost $2.50 becomes $5. The same dollar in your savings account buys less every December than it did the prior January, even though the account balance never dropped.

This is why a salary that feels generous can quietly lose ground. Suppose you earned $60,000 in 2015 and you earn $60,000 today. On paper, nothing changed. In buying power, you took a meaningful pay cut, because the same dollars now stretch across higher prices for nearly everything. The number on the paycheck froze while the cost of living kept climbing.

The calculator makes this concrete in seconds. Enter an amount, a starting year, and an ending year, and it returns the equivalent value adjusted for inflation between those two points. You can run it in either direction:

• Looking back: What would my grandfather's $5,000 in 1980 be worth in today's dollars? The answer is often startling.
• Looking forward: If prices keep rising at their long-run average, what will today's $50,000 nest egg actually buy in 20 years?

Seeing the gap is the first step to planning around it. A dollar saved under the mattress isn't a dollar preserved — it's a dollar slowly leaking value while you aren't watching.