About this page

We pull the numbers from Census, FRED, BLS, and the Social Security Administration, and we print the source on every chart so you can check us. This page will never ask you for money, and when we get something wrong, we correct it publicly.

That paragraph is the closest thing we have to a mission statement, so it goes first.

Why we make charts

Rainy Day Math exists because the gap between the news and the receipt is real, and it is measurable. This June, ground beef averaged $6.82 a pound in the BLS price survey. In 2005 the same survey had it at $2.30. If your memory of grocery prices feels out of step with the official inflation number, you are not confused. The two numbers are answering different questions, and we think somebody should show the work.

So that is the job. We read the government’s own tables, from the BLS and the SSA to the energy and food agencies, we chart what they say, and we write one plain sentence under each chart saying what it means. We also try to say what a chart does not mean, because a number pushed past what it can prove is how most money content goes wrong.

Who runs it

Rainy Day Math is run independently, from the United States, with no company, sponsor, or investor behind it. You will not find a face or a founder story here, and that is on purpose. A number should stand on its source, not on whether you like the person holding it, and a page built around a personality is usually about to sell you one. So we stay out of the way and put the receipts where you can reach them: the source on every chart, the tables named on our editorial policy page, and a correction whenever we earn one.

We are not financial advisors, and nothing here is advice. We do not sell courses, newsletters, coaching, or investments, and we never will. We read data tables and make charts, and we would rather be checkable than impressive. That is why the source goes on the image itself, where it cannot get cropped out of a screenshot.

There is one thing we cannot do from a spreadsheet: we cannot tell you how any of this lands at your house. The averages are everyone’s cart at once, and nobody actually pushes that cart. You will always know your own numbers better than we do.

The promise

If something claiming to be us ever asks you for money, it is not us. How does this page pay for itself, then? Ads, eventually, the same way ads pay for the weather report. That model keeps everything here free, and it means we never need anything from you except a correction when we have earned one.

When we are wrong

We publish corrections where the mistake happened, not on some page nobody visits. The wrong number gets struck through, the right one goes next to it with a date, and the person who caught it gets thanked publicly if they want to be. The full rules are on our editorial policy page.