A euro is a date.

A number and a year

Thirty thousand euros is not a number. It's a number and a year. The same figure that paid for my life in one decade quietly stops covering it in the next, and nothing on a bank statement says so.

A FIRE plan is unusually exposed to this, because the whole thing balances on one figure. You price a life, multiply by thirty, write the result down, and then spend years saving toward it. The figure sits still while you save. Prices don't: since 2020 alone, they're up about 26% across the euro area. A €30,000 life priced in 2020 doesn't cost €30,000 anymore. The number kept its digits and lost some of its meaning.

The doing half of this is a tool. The Old Number looks up what prices actually did in your country since the year you priced your life, and rewrites the number in today's money. This page is the reading half: what the restating means, what the index does and doesn't measure, and why you should never "add inflation" to the calculators on this site.

Real and nominal

Money has two vocabularies. A nominal figure is what the label says: the euros on the statement. A real figure is what those euros buy. A 7% return in a year when prices rose 3% is roughly a 4% raise in life terms (3.9% exactly; the division matters more the bigger the numbers get); the rest of it just kept up. Every serious plan is built in real terms, because the plan's promise was never a number on a screen. It was groceries, rent and time.

Here is the part of this page that earns its keep: every calculator on this site already works in real terms. The 6% default return in the Exit Calculator is a real return, inflation taken out before you ever see it. That's why the answers land in today's euros, and why a €900,000 target here means what €900,000 buys now, not some inflated future figure.

Which makes one careful-looking move exactly wrong: turning the return slider down "to account for inflation" while also inflating your target. That counts the same loss twice, and it will quietly demand years of extra saving for nothing. The honest division of labour is simpler. Restate old numbers. Leave the calculators alone.

The spike

For most of the euro's life, inflation was the boring chapter. Around 2% a year, close enough to the central bank's target that nobody checked. Then came 2021 to 2023. In 2022, euro-area prices rose 8.4% in a single calendar year, the worst in the data. The whole climb since 2020 adds up to about 26%: near 4.0% a year, compounding.

FIRE plans felt it twice. Prices rose while portfolios fell: the groceries needed more euros, and every share sold to raise them was sold into a falling market. That double squeeze has its own name and its own page.

I have a personal stake in this chapter. I retired in April 2022, straight into it. The falling market never worried me much: I'd left with about two years of life in cash, and the plan had priced in a drop. What actually reached me was the prices. Everything cost more than the spreadsheet remembered. I'd just moved to Portugal and needed a car, and the car market had gone strange: nearly-new second-hand cars, some with twenty thousand kilometres on them, were selling for practically the price of new ones. So I bought new. The number I'd priced my life at had aged in the time it took to pack.

The spike has passed: the year to June 2026 reads 2.8%. But notice what "passed" means. Prices settling means rising slower. It almost never means coming back down. The climb stays in your rent and your receipts, which is exactly why an old number needs restating rather than patience.

Your basket is not the average

The headline rate prices a national shopping basket: everything households buy, weighted by how much of it everyone buys. You are not everyone.

The tool's "What moved" bars show six categories from the same official series: food, housing and utilities, health, transport, recreation, restaurants and hotels. They drift apart more than people expect. Since 2020, euro-area food prices are up about 33% while health is up about 16%: same years, same currency, very different bills depending on what your life is made of. There's no energy bar, and that's deliberate: energy has no division of its own. It hides inside two others (electricity and gas in housing, fuel in transport), and a separate energy bar would count it twice.

A retired life weighs the basket differently again: more groceries, services and health, no commuting, no work wardrobe. The average is nobody in particular, and it's least of all a person who stopped working.

You might expect sliders here, to build your own basket. I won't add them, for an honest reason: the official index re-weights itself every year to follow what people actually buy, so a fixed set of sliders laid over that history would produce an estimate dressed up as data. The ECB runs a personal inflation calculator in 23 EU languages, where you set your spending category by category; that's the right tool for your personal rate. Mine does the FIRE half: what the years did to your number.

One more honest note, for readers outside the euro. Each country's index prices in its own currency, so the tool speaks that currency: pounds for the UK, zloty for Poland, francs for Switzerland. What the exchange rate did to anyone's euros is deliberately not in these numbers; that's a different question, and an index that pretended to answer it would be smuggling in a story the data doesn't contain. The UK is the dataset's one seam: Eurostat's UK data runs through November 2020, so its numbers here come from the ONS's CPI, the UK's own build of the same measure. And a currency change doesn't break the thread: Croatia's index runs continuous through its 2023 switch to the euro, Bulgaria's through its own in 2026.

Rents, not houses

The index prices the cost of living in a home, not the cost of buying one. Rent is in it. Utilities are in it. House prices and mortgages are not, because buying a home is partly consumption and partly investment, and the statisticians keep the owner-occupied side in a separate index that the headline measure doesn't include. I don't use it here either.

So read the housing bar as rents and bills. If you rent, it tracks your life closely. If you own outright, your exposure to the biggest line in most budgets is far lower, and your true inflation often runs gentler than the headline; the rest of your basket decides by how much. And if your plan involves buying a home somewhere, don't ask a consumer price index: the atlas's housing pages track what buying actually costs, country by country.

Restate it

The practical half takes a minute. Pick the country, pick the year you priced your life, put in the number. The Old Number looks up the official history and hands back the same life at today's prices: the restated figure, what the change adds to a 30× target, and what the years took from a cash buffer's purchasing power. Then the important step: check the restated number against what your life actually costs now, because the index is a national average and your life isn't.

Your own country's numbers, the current rate and what moved since 2020, also live on its page in the atlas.

What cash pays for calm

Cash is the part of a plan that inflation eats without resistance. The portfolio at least has a fighting chance: the companies in it raise their prices in the same economy that's raising yours. Cash just sits there and takes it. In euro-area terms, a year of spending set aside in 2020 pays for about 9.5 months of the same life today.

So why hold a buffer at all? Because the buffer was never bought for return. It's what lets you not sell shares into a falling market, and that discipline is the argument of the whole far side. The toll is real; the calm it buys is worth it; the honest conclusion is neither "no cash" nor "years of it", but a buffer sized to the job and no bigger. What the job is, and the refill rule that goes with it, is the drawdown manual's chapter.

What to do about it

No verdicts, just the habits that keep a plan honest:

• Date every number you keep. A target without a year attached will lie to you eventually, and it won't announce when it starts.
• Restate before you trust. Any number more than a year or two old goes through the lookup before it's allowed to make decisions.
• Plan in real terms and let the calculators be. The return you assume is a real return; resist the urge to add inflation anywhere else.
• Check your basket once, not monthly. One honest look at whether your life's mix runs hotter or cooler than the average beats a monthly ritual of worry.