Household bills now rising faster than inflation, MSE Bills Tracker shows - MSE News 26 November 2018 at 11:05AM in Budgeting & bank accounts 4 replies 753 views

Former_MSE_Naomi

Household bills are rising faster than inflation for the first time since April 2017, according to the latest MSE Bills Tracker...

Read the full story:
'Household bills now rising faster than inflation, MSE Bills Tracker shows'

Click reply below to discuss. If you haven’t already, join the forum to reply.

VT82

What an entirely meaningless headline.

eskbanker

VT82 wrote: »

What an entirely meaningless headline.

You could argue that MSE's isolating of an arbitrary collection of costs as 'household bills', for regular review versus published official inflation figures, is meaningless, but having done that, the headline matches the article!

Having said that, there is some sort of rationale behind their selection, i.e.

MSE's Bills Tracker cuts down the CPIH basket of goods and services to about 40 costs which many typical households are likely to face every month (see the full list below).

We've focused on bills rather than expenses such as food, and stripped out items included in the CPIH that you're unlikely to buy often, if at all, such as rugs, door handles, a ten-pin bowling session and knitting wool. In other words, this is designed to be a real bills index reflecting typical household costs.

VT82

It's a fair measure as you say. Why they decided to compare it to the CPIH inflation measure including bowling alley visits and knitting wool that they've slated, rather than the much more obvious choice of wage growth, seems a bit of an odd choice for a financial journalism site.

Mr_Mann

Spare a thought for those unable to work receiving up to £115 week which has been frozen since 2014 and will remain so for years to come. Every year it just gets harder to manage. Is this Theresa May's idea of 'A FAIR SOCIETY THAT WORKS FOR EVERYBODY' that she kept saying she would create prior to her election ? They have made those with the lowest incomes pay for austerity.