I had had a period in which I got obsessed learning about financial infrastructure and different investment options in Pakistan and practicalities of it. One weird feature I observed was that literally no one talks or considers about real or inflation-adjusted return. In a country where year-on-year inflation goes swinging like this: 9%, 23%, 31%, 7%, 6% ¹, the nominal returns showed by your brokerage firm or mutual fund app give you no idea about how your investments are performing.

So, I brushed up my old PKR inflation adjustment calculator Aaj Ke Hisaab Se and just finished with its v2. The primary feature now is calculating real/ inflation-adjusted returns². The historic currency conversion feature is also retained, but it is a secondary feature now. And the cool thing is I have automated the data fetching, so it will get updated with new CPI value released by PBS, by itself on 5th of every month.

1. Sep values for last 5 years ↩︎
2. In the very first version, it was using gold prices as deflator, but that was partly because I was unable to find older CPI data. Using gold for this purpose was not suitable as gold prices have been very volatile, and they haven’t been a good reflection of an average consumer’s purchasing power. But later I was able to hunt historic CPI data, but hadn’t actually updated the calculator. ↩︎