While some of the strategies and approaches in the book "Your Money or Your Life" no longer work in today's economic climate, one of the authors' arguments has intrigued me: they claim that you can effectively shield yourself from inflation by changing your consumption habits.

Most of the changes they recommend fall into the basic categories of frugality: buying things used and on sale, resisting the temptation to get the latest-and-greatest gadgets, ignoring style and fashion, and buying good-quality stuff that lasts a long time. For example, if you find some trousers you really like and you invest in 10 pairs on sale for half price, you may never have to buy trousers again for 25 years or more. I'm still wearing some Patagonia clothes that I bought in the 1980s, and Patagonia has a lifetime guarantee anyway so I've had several items repaired or replaced by them for free over the years. Similarly, I bought a good suit in 1992 and I still wear it today, it's my only suit and because I don't need to wear a suit very often it's still in great shape. I might need to buy a new one in the next 10 years or so but that one should last me the rest of my life.

Where I think the "inflation proofing" argument fails is when you start talking about electricity, transportation, and food. You can stock up on canned goods, rice, dried beans, etc., but you can't really protect yourself from future price increases in perishables. And unless you generate your own electricity or run your car with homemade biodiesel, you're vulnerable to price increases in those areas as well.

Still, though the authors make an interesting argument that we can reduce the impact of inflation and its impact on the future value of our investments, particularly given that during retirement we generally have more free time to spend on activities that save money, and our cost of living is generally lower...no mortgage payments, etc.). Curious to hear what others think about this.

A 20-year-old suit, even in new condition, looks like a 20-year-old suit. Imagine in the wearing a suit made in the 70s when you bought your present suit. Enormous lapels, flared pant legs, superwide tie with a giant knot, etc.

It's not a matter of being fashionable or not being fashionable. It's a matter of presentation. Kind of like showing viewgraphs in a PowerPoint era. If you're consulting or doing business, impressions can make a difference between getting a contract or not getting a contract.

Nope, that's why you follow the "ignore fashion" rule and buy clothing with a timeless style. I was careful to buy a classic suit that didn't have any concessions to contemporary fashion so it could be worn far into the future, and I've never felt out of place with it.

All during the 70s I refused to buy flared pants (it was challenging to find non-flared jeans, believe me!) for the same reason. I always try to buy clothing that doesn't make any fashion statement and thus never looks dated. It probably just looks boring, but I don't mind.

OK, but suits have a "style" that changes over time. 20 years ago, double-breasted suits with pleated pants were the standard. Nowadays, such suits look like ... 20 year old suits. VinTek's point is valid. You'll look like you're wearing a (very well-kept) 20 year old suit.

I suppose you could cover the outdated jacket with a nice windbreaker, and maybe disguise the pleating in the pants with some legwarmers.... perhaps a tie-dyed scarf to tie it all together? Keep a Pet Rock(TM) in your pocket, for luck.

Actually suits are one area where you can find classic styles that don't change. I see suits in the high-end men's clothing stores that really look no different from the suit I bought in 1992. Mine didn't have pleated trousers, it's a very simple classic suit; you can go back another 20 years and find suits with the same style as well.

I work as a consultant on multi-million dollar contracts and I honestly can't think of any situation where the fact that I wasn't wearing an up-to-the-minute-fashion suit might have played into my clients' decisions on whether we had the skills and experience to do the job. And personally if a client rejected me for a contract because they felt I didn't look "professional" enough, I probably wouldn't want to work for a client like that anyway. We get our contracts based on our skills, the quality of our past work, and our experience.

I have to agree that inflation proofing is difficult if not impossible today. You can mitigate the effects of inflation by sticking to necessities, used items etc but you can't escape it.

You can't really make yourself truly inflation proof short of taking yourself out of anything involving money. That includes taking yourself completely off the grid, meaning you have to make your own food, live somewhere you own (or can claim) but that isn't subject to property taxes, etc. But I personally would rather be a member of society.

So barring that.

Buying high quality suits, pants, etc on sale is cute, if we have hyperinflation I'm not going to give a darn what pants I am wearing. You can stockpile food, but stockpiled food doesn't last forever, nor can you stock a lifetime supply of it.

It is not clear to me at all how common frugality tactics help against inflation. Maybe - maybe they help if and when inflation hits. On the other hand if you use time today to save dollars today (for instance, buying used, or spending time finding sales), but those dollars are worth less tomorrow than you expected, then you spent your time for less of a return than you expected.

So it seems to me you can't really be bulletproof against inflation. You can hedge against it. But many hedges against inflation, go the other way (cost you money) if inflation is low.

One commonly available inflation is a house with a fixed-rate mortgage. The house probably goes up in nominal value with inflation. The mortgage payment goes down in real value (because it stays the same in nominal value). Taxes probably go up with nominal value - so hopefully property taxes aren't a big part of your expenses (I am friends with a couple whose annual property taxes are more than I paid in rent last year).

I'm thinking of this mainly in terms of a strategy to avoid the impact of inflation once you're on a fixed income (e.g., retirement), which is how it's presented in Your Money or Your Life. The authors recommended conservative investments and they presented these strategies as a counter-argument against those who argue that conservative investments are risky because they'll be overtaken by inflation. Their argument is that inflation doesn't matter much if you follow their approach.

As I pointed out above, I'm the first to agree that you can't avoid inflation when it comes to energy costs, food costs, etc. unless you're totally self-sufficient. But I do think the authors have a point when it comes to things like clothing and other non-perishable supplies.

To use a silly example (even sillier than suits), I picked up a dozen big boxes of staples (literally staples, as in the staples you use to staple paper together) at a flea market in 1979, and I haven't finished them yet. I expect that this one purchase will last me the rest of my life. If the price of staples went up 400% in the next 20 years, it wouldn't affect me. Transfer that concept to clothing and other recurring purchases and it becomes more interesting. I find that as I get older, I often buy two of something and save one for when the first wears out. You're buying things with today's dollars so you don't have to buy them again with tomorrow's (more expensive) dollars. Of course you have to figure out where to store this stuff, so I don't go overboard on this strategy. But I think there's some merit to it. I have a friend who buys all of her clothing at thrift shops and she's been paying less for her clothes now than she did 30 years ago. And the stuff she's wearing is very high class, much of it designer wear that she never could afford new. It's amazing what ends up in thrift shops.

I can't envision a scenario in my lifetime when America will have hyper-inflation. Tell me one and I'll tell you why it won't happen.

If the biggest threat to a fixed income is inflation then your best bet against inflation is not having a fixed income. Assuming you don't want to work then you need to invest your money in companies that sell things...things that also go up in price. With gold being about the worst thing you could own.

Your staples purchase is a good example of what not to do, but probably better than buying gold. At least your staples reliably held things together, gold can't even do that.

Say you spent $5 on your lifetime supply of staples in 1979. You could have also bought one split adjusted share of Johnson and Johnson at that time. Now it's worth $65 a share and you've received many times your original investment back in dividends. Some of which could have been used for buying more staples, as needed.

Also, have staples really gone up in price? Maybe not.

Okay, but you could have alternatively bought shares in Nortel (well, maybe Nortel wasn't around in 1979 I can't remember) and those would be worth exactly $0 today, so you come out ahead with the staples.

The authors' point about conservative investments is that at least you don't risk losing your principal, it just gets eroded away by inflation. With stocks you have the risk of losing everything. I know that over the long term, a diversified portfolio of equities, such as index funds, mixed with a relatively small portion of conservative investments, has the highest probability of beating inflation. But as I've pointed out in other threads here, there is always the risk that the particular time horizon of your investments happens to coincide with a lost decade or two and you could end up worse off than if you'd just stuck everything in CDs or even a HISA. Unlikely but possible.

I loved the staples example, and to be honest, I've actually put some thought into "stockpiling" non-perishable items myself, in the interest of staving off inflation to a degree. The problem, as I see it, is that so few things can be relied upon to last a lifetime. Plastics degrade, rubber seals dry out and crack, food spoils... I think a great topic would be for people to suggest items that keep for a very long time and can be stocked up on for a lifetime supply.

As I said, I've spent some time thinking about this, and here's the list I came up with to start:

• Bars of soap
• Shampoo
• Razor blades & razors
• Toothpaste
• Toothbrushes
• Socks
• Underwear
• Shaving cream
• Mousse
• T-shirts
• Shoelaces
• Dried pasta
• Peanuts
• Salt
• Pepper
• Kleenex
• Toilet paper
• Dish soap

Anyone else?

The problem with socks is that one out of every pair has this propensity to go walkabout. At the beginning of every year I buy a new supply of socks, and by the end of the year most of them are down to one sock each. I don't know where they go. My plan is to buy 200 pairs of identical socks, and that way it doesn't matter if some go missing as all the other socks in my collection will be the same.

Seriously, though, I'm not big on stockpiling, in part because I don't have room and I really hate the idea of having a crowded basement that looks like I'm preparing for World War III. My father used to stock up on canned goods when they were on sale, and we had about 500 cans of peas (I consider canned peas inedible), corn, and other stuff in our basement. It was all still there when he died. I don't want to be one of those people.

My point was really this: as we get closer to retirement, we are advised to shift a good portion of our investments from equities to more conservative investments, because the behavior of the market matters more and more as we get closer to needing the money. You still want to keep some in equities because you may spend 30 years in retirement and that's a big opportunity for growth. But on the other hand as you get older you become less cognitively able to manage your finances and some experts are now advising people to put a big portion of their nest egg into annuities to provide a personal pension. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that you're more vulnerable to inflation during your retirement years, so it's worth thinking about ways in which you can shield yourself from its effects. Buying a reasonable stockpile of things now that you can use later, or shifting to a pattern of buying things used when you get older, can in fact help you avoid inflation for some types of goods. It won't help for services or for energy and transportation, but it's worth thinking about what you can do to increase your resilience to the effects of inflation once you hit retirement age.

I find that if I pair up the dirty socks before they go in the washer, and then again as they go into the dryer, my socks stay much more local

Thought provoking idea, inflation-proofing.

Property taxes have me stumped - what ideas do you all have there? Can't pre-buy...guess it's best to live somewhere with relatively low property tax burden and/or income- or age-based exclusions or annual increase caps.

What other categories seem particularly troublesome to you all?

For hyper-inflation, owning industrial commodities or productive assets may be the best bet (including agricultural assets and real estate). Or living on a self-sustaining old school farm.

For garden-variety inflation, I can think of mild hedges for utilities (local generation, net-zero house), food (garden with seed stock, chickens, fish pond), healthcare (stay healthy and select care options as though it were the 19th century), auto fuel (walk or bicycle)...most other consumer goods I could just make do , use it up, wear it out or do without.

Some people deal with the property tax and other cost issues by retiring to a developing country where they can live comfortably on a pittance. But that has its own inconveniences.

The problem with net-zero houses is that some of the technologies that make them net-zero generally have to be replaced after a couple of decades, and those technologies are not cheap. On the other hand, economies of scale should bring down the price of things like solar panels over the next 20 years, as long as the prices of the raw materials used to make their components don't rise too much.

I never really notice inflation myself; it's only when I look at old magazines and catalogues and see the prices in the advertisements that it hits home. In the 1960s you could buy a pair of L.L. Bean moccasins for about $8; today the same model costs $69. My first fulltime job paid a salary of $9,000/year and I got by (just barely). It would be hard to do that nowadays.

- Light bulbs
- Linens
- furniture

To add to kombat's list.