It's been around 10 years since I first did my Early Retirement Extreme calculations, back when I was still working and earning a very reasonable salary.
Back then I remember calculating that mortgage free I would be able to live off £1000 pretty comfortably, and I think I've done a pretty good job of keeping that figure up to date for inflation over the years.
I do income and expenditure checks at least once every few months, and so they've given me an idea of how much I need, and last time I checked I was looking at around £1300 a month to live comfortably.
However I thought it was worth quickly checking how figures from 10 years ago stack up to figures today and The Bank of England have a handy calculator to do just that. You simply enter an amount and the relative years and it translates X amount of money Y amount of years ago and gives you the equivalent in today's money:
And low and behold the figure I get roughly stacks up to the figures I'd been coming up with in my expenditure trackings.
The BoE figures simply use the CPI and this is what my private teacher's pension is linked to, which covers food and most other basic expenditures and this will cover most of my basic outgoings from the time I can claim it at 60 (hopefully).
It's good to know that I haven't been suffering from frog in boiling water syndrome over my expenditure, and that my brain thing has been adjusting for inflation over the months and years.
And it's especially good to keep these reality checks in mind given the high inflation we've been experiencing over the last year, one wouldn't want to get caught out!