I was doing some analysis of my investment portfolio to assess how close I was to being financially independent, and started doing some "what-if" of the various planning parameters assumed. One of the important factor was the future "inflation rate".
I've always worked under the impression that 3% was a reasonable number to use, and I wondered how realistic that was? Tweaking the figures between 2% and 4% showed dramatically drastic impacts. It is clearly a very sensitive parameter - i.e. small changes would cause disproportionate outcomes.
I came across one article (
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/singapore/inflation-cpi) which mentioned that the average was 2.75% (from 1962 to 2015).
Checking against the Department of Statistics data (
http://www.singstat.gov.sg/statistics/browse-by-theme/prices), I obtained the following:
| Table 1. Time Series on CPI (2014=100) and Inflation Rate (as at Feb 2015) |
|
|
|
| Year |
Consumer Price Index (2014=100) |
Annual Inflation rate |
| 1980 |
... |
...
