How it works

What the money buys, not the number on it. Every result is divided by how far prices rose in your country over the same years.

prices rose       = price index at the end ÷ price index at the start
after inflation   = worth at the end ÷ prices rose

Türkiye, ₺400,000 put away in 2015. Prices rose ×12.2 by 2025 — +28% a year on average. Kept as cash, it is still ₺400,000, but that buys what ₺32,745 bought in 2015: −92%.

At +28% a year, cash loses half its buying power every 2.8 years — the figure under the map: years = ln 2 ÷ ln(1 + inflation).

0% on every chart means kept pace with prices exactly. The chart reads in 2015 money: a line at −50% buys half of what it bought when it was put away.

Every line starts at 0% and shows buying power, not the number on the money. The vertical axis is what the amount would buy compared with the start year. Above 0% — shaded green — it beat prices; below, shaded red, it lost to them. A dot marks where every line starts and where each one ends up.

• The dashed line is cash. Its number never changes, so the line is exactly what prices took — the price rise, upside down. Every other line is measured against the same prices.
• The bars under the years are how much prices rose that year. In Türkiye the tallest is 2022: prices +72%, and the year the lines fall furthest. A year like that takes 42% of cash’s buying power: 1 − 1 ÷ (1 + inflation).
• Log scale, the default, puts −50% and +100% the same distance from 0%: halving and doubling are the same size of move, so a line’s slope means the same wherever it sits. Linear spaces every percentage point evenly instead, which makes big gains look bigger and big losses look smaller.
• Hover a year to read every line there, how far prices had risen by then, and that year’s own inflation — 2022 reads prices ×3.71 since 2015 · +72% that year.
• The chart ahead reads the same way, starting today. Each holding compounds at a steady rate, so on the log scale every line is straight.

Bought at one year’s average price, valued at a later year’s. Prices, exchange rates and metal prices are all annual averages, so both ends of every holding are measured the same way.

cash              = the amount, unchanged
foreign currency  = amount × its rate at the end ÷ its rate at the start
gold, silver      = amount × (dollar price × dollar rate) at the end
                           ÷ (dollar price × dollar rate) at the start
deposit           = amount × (1 + rate × (1 − tax)), once for each year held

Türkiye, ₺400,000 from 2015 to 2025:

Foreign currency

Held as notes, earning nothing: its whole result is the exchange rate. Every currency is converted through its official rate to the US dollar, so the euro against the TRY is the TRY per dollar divided by the euros per dollar.

Gold and silver

Priced in dollars per troy ounce, then turned into TRY at each year’s dollar rate. Two things move them: the metal’s dollar price, and your currency against the dollar.

The bank deposit

Interest added once a year at that year’s published average rate, then left in — the rates of the years the money sits through, 2015 to 2024. The tax field takes its share of each year’s interest. The rate is an average across banks and terms, so your own will differ.

Every rate is an assumption you can change. Nobody knows next year’s gold price or exchange rate, so the tool offers two starting points and no forecast.

worth in year Y    = amount × (1 + its yearly rise)^Y
after inflation    = worth in year Y ÷ (1 + inflation)^Y

Neutral rates

Rates that assume no one wins by luck. Another currency rises against yours by the gap between the two inflation rates, so holding it loses exactly that country’s own inflation. Metals rise with your prices, so they neither gain nor lose. The deposit pays your country’s assumed savings rate.

currency  = (1 + your inflation) ÷ (1 + its inflation) − 1
metals    = your inflation
deposit   = the assumed savings rate, less tax

For Türkiye: inflation 22%, so the dollar rises 18.9% a year against the TRY (US inflation 2.6%), gold and silver 22%, the deposit 38%.

The last years, repeated

Each holding rises at the rate it actually rose over the years the tool is looking back on, before tax, and prices at the rate they did. For Türkiye since 2015: inflation 28.4%, the dollar 30.7%, gold 45.7%, the deposit 26.6%. What happened is a fact; that it happens again is an assumption like any other.

Every country, shaded by one holding’s result since your start year. Switch it between cash, dollars, gold and the deposit. Where the dollar is the currency, holding dollars is holding cash.

The seven shades are fixed results, so a colour means the same thing whichever holding or year is showing:

A country is grey when its data does not reach back to the year chosen, or when there is nothing to measure — a deposit where no rate is published. It is not started from a later year to fill the gap.

143 countries, 2010 to 2025, retrieved 2026-09-22. Each country ends at its own latest published year: United States, Qatar, Vietnam, Russia, Albania, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Laos, Tunisia, Gambia, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Bahamas, Vanuatu end a year early, because the World Bank has not yet published their latest figures.

The euro

The World Bank switches a country’s exchange rate from its old currency to euros in the year it joins — Estonia in 2011, Latvia in 2014, Lithuania in 2015, Croatia in 2023 — and the switch looks like a crash or a boom that never happened. Every euro country reads the euro-area rate for every year instead: what its savings became.

A redenomination moves a rate by a round factor overnight. The data script refuses to run if any currency it keeps moves by more than half or five times in a year, so a unit change cannot reach the page as a result.

An official rate nobody could buy at is not a result. In these countries it priced foreign currency far below what people paid, for long enough that the tool would state a wrong answer as a measured one:

• Argentina — Official rate far below the parallel rate for most of 2011–2015 and 2019–2024.
• Bolivia — Official rate held at 6.96 per dollar while the street rate roughly doubled (2023–2025).
• Iran — Official rate a fraction of the market rate since 2018.
• Lebanon — Official rate held at 1,507.5 per dollar through 2022 while the market rate passed 20,000.
• Libya — Official rate a fraction of the market rate through 2015–2020.
• Myanmar — Official rate far below the market rate since 2021.
• South Sudan — Official rate far below the parallel rate, and inflation in the thousands of percent.
• Sudan — Official rate far below the parallel rate through 2012–2021.
• Syria — Official rate far below the market rate since 2012.
• Turkmenistan — Official rate fixed at 3.5 per dollar, several times below the market rate.
• Venezuela — No exchange rate published after 2017.
• Yemen — Two different rials in circulation since 2019.
• Zimbabwe — Currency replaced twice; the series changes unit.

And these have no recent data to measure:

• Afghanistan — World Bank exchange rates stop in 2020.
• Bosnia and Herzegovina — World Bank prices stop in 2023.
• Cuba — No World Bank consumer prices.
• DR Congo — World Bank prices stop in 2016.
• Eritrea — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Eswatini — World Bank prices stop in 2019.
• Falkland Islands — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Greenland — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Guinea — World Bank exchange rates stop in 2020.
• Malawi — World Bank exchange rates stop in 2023.
• Mauritania — World Bank exchange rates stop in 2023.
• New Caledonia — World Bank prices stop in 2016.
• North Korea — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Northern Cyprus — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Puerto Rico — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Sierra Leone — World Bank exchange rates stop in 2023.
• Somalia — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Somaliland — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Sri Lanka — World Bank exchange rates stop in 2023.
• Taiwan — No World Bank consumer prices.
• Tajikistan — World Bank prices stop in 2016.
• Western Sahara — No World Bank consumer prices.