Tony Soprano stashed his money in a bag of bird food outdoors. This may make you laugh, but if you’re keeping money in a bank account that isn’t paying interest, your future purchasing power may also take a hit.
In fact, according to a Bankrate survey in May, nearly a quarter of people weren’t earning any interest at all, and another 20 percent were getting an interest rate of less than 1 percent.
Let’s say you had $40,000 hidden outdoors in 2002, and the money was still there today. Turns out you’d need $56,606.95 to purchase now what you could then, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s about a 41 percent increase in around 17 years.
So while the crime boss of the television series, “The Sopranos,” knew about many of his enemies — inflation probably wasn’t on his radar.