Question

Help please with this question

Answer 1

Answer:

They lose about 2.79% in purchasing power.

Step-by-step explanation:

Whenever you're dealing with purchasing power and inflation, you need to carefully define what the reference is for any changes you might be talking about. Here, we take purchasing power at the beginning of the year as the reference. Since we don't know when the 6% year occurred relative to the year in which the saving balance was $200,000, we choose to deal primarily with percentages, rather than dollar amounts.

Each day, the account value is multiplied by (1 + 0.03/365), so at the end of the year the value is multiplied by about

... (1 +0.03/365)^365 ≈ 1.03045326

Something that had a cost of 1 at the beginning of the year will have a cost of 1.06 at the end of the year. A savings account value of 1 at the beginning of the year would purchase one whole item. At the end of the year, the value of the savings account will purchase ...

... 1.03045326 / 1.06 ≈ 0.9721 . . . items

That is, the loss of purchasing power is about ...

... 1 - 0.9721 = 2.79%

_____

If the account value is $200,000 at the beginning of the year in question, then the purchasing power normalized to what it was at the beginning of the year is now $194,425.14, about $5,574.85 less.