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About

An editorial reference, written by someone who worked at BLS.

fefinance.xyz is a single-purpose project: an inflation calculator built around the official CPI series of four major economies, surrounded by reference material that a former federal price-statistics economist is willing to put her name on.

The CPI is a weighted average of price changes across a representative basket of goods and services. The figure is right on aggregate and approximate for any individual. That's not a flaw — the CPI was never designed to track any single household's inflation experience — but the public conversation around inflation mostly forgets the distinction. fefinance.xyz exists to make that distinction visible alongside the headline calculation.

Editorial principles

  • Official data only. Bundled CPI tables are sourced from BLS, ONS, Eurostat, and Statistics Canada. We do not use third-party aggregators.
  • Annual refresh. Tables are refreshed each January after the December year-end CPI release.
  • Named accountability. Eleanor Whitman, PhD, is the responsible reviewer. Her academic record and former BLS service are independently verifiable.
  • No commercial relationships. The site does not earn referral fees from any inflation-protected investment, gold dealer, or financial product.
  • Privacy by architecture. Inputs stay in your browser. Tables are bundled with the page.

What this site is not

  • It is not regulated investment advice. Inflation hedging requires a planner who knows your specific portfolio.
  • It is not a replacement for the BLS, ONS, Eurostat, or Statistics Canada public calculators for legal or contractual escalation. Use the official calculator for those purposes.
  • It is not a forecast. We do not project future inflation. The calculator is a backward-looking measurement tool.
  • It is not personal-inflation-rate aware. Your basket may differ materially from the CPI basket.

Verification methodology

  1. Reference cases. 24 input/output pairs across four CPI series, spanning the period 1980–2026, every release run against BLS / ONS / Eurostat / Statistics Canada public calculators.
  2. Closed-form match. The calculator computes amount × (CPItarget / CPIorigin); this matches the official calculation method for all four series.
  3. Annual refresh logged. The bundled-table refresh date is recorded in the engine's source-file header; readers can verify the table was synced this year.
  4. Linear interpolation for fractional years. Only used when the user requests a year not in the annual table; otherwise direct lookup.

The team

fefinance.xyz is a one-person editorial project alongside Eleanor's consulting work. Eleanor reviews every release before publication and holds final editorial authority. A part-time research assistant, also based in Ann Arbor, maintains the bundled-table refresh pipeline (downloading the year-end CSV from BLS / ONS / Eurostat / Statistics Canada and reformatting to the bundled table format). The assistant is named in the public changelog only when their input has produced a substantive change.

Get in touch

Calculation queries, table-refresh discrepancies, content corrections, and partnership enquiries are all handled through the contact page. We commit to acknowledging every well-formed message within 24 business hours.