A free tool from Clear As Mud Media

Is your money shrinking?

Your bank pays you interest. Prices go up. If prices go up faster than your interest, your savings buy less every year, even though the number in your account keeps growing.

This page checks which one is winning, using official figures, updated every day. Start with your own money.

Check your money

Fill in your numbers. Everything is already filled in for you, so you can just change what's different.

$
How much tax do you pay on interest?
30%

Your year, in buying power

It's not just you

Each dial is one country: its main interest rate against how fast its prices are rising. Needle left of 0, savings are shrinking. Right of 0, they're growing.

Shrinking fast Shrinking Barely ahead Growing

These dials are before tax. Tax on your interest makes every one of them worse. Want to see it with your own tax? Pick your country and tax bracket up the top ↑

So what's going on?

Governments owe more money than ever. The United States alone owes around $40 trillion.

There's a quiet way to make a debt that big smaller without anyone voting for it: keep interest rates below inflation. Every year prices rise, the debt is worth a bit less. So is the money in your savings account.

It has a name: financial repression. You won't hear it on the nightly news, but it's been done before. After World War II, governments shrank their debts mostly this way, and people who had lent them money lost about half their buying power in five years.

Is it happening again? The dials above are the test. If interest stays below inflation, year after year, while the debts keep growing, it is.

Watch Chapter 1, free

  1. 1 · The debt is huge

    Too big to pay back the normal way.

  2. 2 · Prices rise faster than interest

    The debt shrinks a little in real terms every year.

  3. 3 · Savers pay for it

    Your money buys less, quietly, year after year.

The series: Financial Repression

The Quiet Tax on Your Savings. Short animated chapters that explain how it works, who it helps, and what it means for you. Free on YouTube. Start at Chapter 1.

Ruby, host of Clear As Mud

Clear As Mud Media

Muddy world. Clear answers.

Ruby explains it. Ajay digs it up. Animated explainers about money, power and how things really work, made for people who never got taught any of this. Entertainment and education, not financial advice.

The small print

Each country's main interest rate is the one its central bank sets. Savings accounts roughly follow it, but yours may pay more or less, so put in your own rate above. Inflation is the latest official figure, usually one or two months old (New Zealand only measures it every three months, so its figure can be older). Tax buttons are that country's tax brackets for interest; the most common one is picked to start with.

The sums are kept simple: interest minus tax minus the rise in prices. Every figure is an official one, from central banks and national statistics offices, and refreshes twice a day. If a source is down, the last good figure stays up and is marked stale.

See all the numbers and sources
CountryMain interest rateInflationMost common tax on interestBefore taxAfter that taxGovt 10-yr bondSources

This is not financial advice. It's general information and simple sums, for education. It doesn't know your situation and doesn't recommend any product, bank or investment. Before making decisions about your money, talk to a licensed financial adviser.