I built this tool for my own planning. I wanted to see how inflation and currency exchange rates change my U.S. dollar buying power over time, at home in the U.S. and in the countries I travel to.

Exchange rates and inflation do not always move in the same direction. The U.S. dollar might buy more local currency than it did a few years ago, while local prices went up even faster. I wanted one place that puts both together, so I could see what my dollars actually buy now compared with a past year.

How to fill this out

Add up to five countries
Start typing a country name and pick it from the list. Other common names work too, like Turkiye for Turkey or Dubai for the United Arab Emirates, and you do not need to type accents. You can compare up to five countries at a time. The United States is already on every chart as a dashed line, so you do not need to add it. A few countries are left out because they use more than one exchange rate or their inflation figures are not published, and the tool tells you why when you pick one. For a few others, the official data is incomplete right now, so the tool checks for it when you add them and lets you know if there is not enough yet.

Starting year
Choose the past year you want to compare against. The tool looks at every year from that one through the most recent year with complete data, and each comparison covers at least five years, so the latest starting year you can pick is five years before that. Data for some countries starts later than for others, so the earliest year you can pick is the first year all of your countries share, and the tool tells you which country sets that limit.

Monthly budget in your starting year
Enter what you spent in a typical month in the year you picked, or a monthly budget you want to test from that year. Use whole U.S. dollars from $100 to $100,000. For each country, the results show how much you would need in the most recent year with complete data to buy what that budget bought in your starting year.