What Is Inflation? That's a great question and one particular that unfortunately there has not been an answer that everybody agrees upon. The term is often a general description on the decreasing value of your unit of income over time. Therefore should you were to have 5 dollars now and went out and buried it and left it there for fifty years you would not have as much purchasing power with that 5 bucks that you had back whenever you buried it.
This calculation shows how inflation will affect your money over time. The purchasing power indicates what percentage of today's buying power your money will have in the future.