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Showing posts from August, 2014

Temporal Arbitrage: Buying Low, Buying Lower

If you could go back in time, what would you trade with your parents? Although we like to boil down inflation to a single figure, cost of living is not as simple as CPI. Prices of different goods and services change at different rates. Something that may have been cheap in the past may be more expensive now. Conversely, expensive items may become cheaper. Add monetary inflation - the overall weakening of currency's purchasing power - into the mix and it gets confusing. Ultimately, we are not all affected the same way by price changes because we don't all buy the same things. What if we could use the differences in price changes to inform our purchasing, increase our savings, and thereby our wealth? I term this 'maximising cheap, minimising costly' expenditure strategy - spurred by my first question - 'Temporal Arbitrage'.