Finally some good news: the cost of living is apparently holding steady.
Earlier this week, the IRS announced that interest rates will remain the same for the calendar quarter beginning January 1, 2012.
And that’s not the only indicator… The PNC Christmas Price Index® has been released this year and prices seem to be holding constant. The cost for a set of the gifts in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” bumped up a mere 3.5% to $24,263.18 for 2011. This follows a huge leap in 2010 of 9.2% to $23,439.38.
Those trends aren’t coincidental. James Dunigan, managing executive of investments for PNC Wealth Management, explains (downloads as a pdf):
Typically we see parallels between our Index and the Federal government’s.
To figure the costs of the items, PNC went straight to the experts. This year, the company relied on Philadelphia dance companies, the Pennsylvania Ballet and Philadanco, to price out the services of the ten lords-a-leaping and the nine ladies dancing. The prices for most of the birds – including the partridge and the turtledoves – were provided by the National Aviary in Pittsburgh.
If you want to buy the whole shebang from a single partridge to twelve drummers drumming for each verse (that’s 364 separate pieces of Christmas joy), it will cost you $101,119.84. The most expensive items on the list? Those seven swans a-swimming: you’ll have to shell out $6,300 for them, an increase of 12.5%.
While the cost of goods seemed to rise, labor, not surprisingly, remained fairly constant. Of the four gifts that didn’t increase in price, three of them – eight maids-a-milking, nine ladies dancing and ten lords-a-leaping – were related to employment. Musicians, however, pulled in a slightly higher price with boosts for both the eleven pipers piping and twelve drummers drumming.
The cost of the pear tree that houses the infamous partridge increased by a whopping 13.3% at suburban Philadelphia’s Waterloo Gardens, consistent with a rise in prices for many agricultural products. The popularity, however, of pear trees at the holidays remains fairly low – perhaps if we tacked a tax on them to raise consciousness a la the Christmas tree, they’d fare better.
The Christmas Price Index began 28 years ago, in 1984, when the chief economist at PNC Bank decided to figure out how much it would cost to buy each of the gifts. It’s now an annual tradition… kind of like this one:
