Is Inflation Eating Away Your Savings?

According to various measurements, the price of food and energy have increased anywhere from 6% to 9% in the past year. Meanwhile the interest rate on savings accounts have been slashed dramatically to less than 2%. In this environment, it is easy for a saver to feel like a fool, but there are ways you can mitigate the effects of inflation and still save for the future.

1. Stockpile food - Obviously, you can’t stockpile fresh food for very long, but you can certainly keep quite a bit of dried, canned, and freezable goods.  If you have room for storage, things like pasta or wine can be kept for a pretty long time. Sales are even better for stockpiling. For example, in my story about Safeway’s promotion I got quite a bit of pasta roni,canned tomatoes, and toothpaste for very little money. Now I wish I bought more because we went through the food pretty quickly. Stockpiling food is a form of non-financial investment that could pay off better than stocks as long as you do eat the food before it goes bad.

2. Invest in High Yield Dividend Stocks - I have a few stock holdings that have been giving out very high dividends. The ones I own are mostly natural resource and mineral stocks. I’m not an expert in stock picking, though, so the percentage of my individual stock holding is about 6% of my entire portfolio. There are a lot of ways to pick your dividend stocks and a simple and popular method is The Dogs of the Dow. In the current market, you have to be careful with the stocks that give too high of an yield because some of them may be dying financial services. As always, do your research before you invest.

3. Buy a Reasonably Priced House to Live In - If buying a house makes sense in your area it may be a good hedge against inflation. I am a staunch bubble sitter here in San Mateo because home prices are still way too high to justify buying a home. If inflation actually drove rent to within 10% of mortgage prices, I would consider buying, but the situation I am facing now is that home prices are falling but rent is still 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a mortgage on a comparable unit. However, if you can afford a home and in your area it is cheaper to buy than rent, it makes sense to buy a house to protect yourself against further rent hikes. As long as you get a fixed rate mortgage, your payments will stay the same throughout the term of a home loan.

I am sure there are many other ways people protect their savings from inflation. I have read that many people invest in I-Bonds or TIPS, which have variable rates related to inflation. I actually own some I-Bonds because they are state tax free. The problem is that these treasury bonds fluctuate with the core inflation rate, which doesn’t include food and energy. The result is that the return is lower than the real inflation, but they are generally better than dumping all your money in the bank or in a money market. The key is that you can manage your money well and diminish the effect of inflation when you put a little time into it. What have you been doing to fight inflation?

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