{"id":275671,"date":"2018-10-07T18:30:41","date_gmt":"2018-10-07T16:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=275671"},"modified":"2018-10-05T16:12:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-05T14:12:40","slug":"11-things-that-have-actually-become-cheaper-in-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/finance\/275671\/11-things-that-have-actually-become-cheaper-in-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"11 things that have actually become cheaper in 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

South African consumers have endured a difficult time in 2018, started by a VAT hike to 15% in April, while rising fuel prices and an economy in recession has meant no respite during the course of the year.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the latest available inflation figures from Stats SA paints a pretty dismal picture for households, showing that pretty much everything has climbed in price since January 2018, across all categories.<\/p>\n

However, there are at least 11 items covered by Stats SA that shows that not everything has gone up.<\/p>\n

According to the data, the cost of telecoms equipment in South Africa has actually decreased by 8.5% since the start of the year – with the price of fruit coming a close second, down 8.1%.<\/p>\n

Sugar, sweets and desserts have also seen prices drop, with index points showing a 4.8% drop, with other categories showing smaller drops, like furnishings (-1.8%), recreational equipment (-1.3%) and oils and fats (-1.1%) also costing less.<\/p>\n

The graph below shows 11 things that have actually come down in price since the start of 2018.<\/p>\n

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Of course, the vast majority of items have seen increases – some particularly painful on households.<\/p>\n

As most consumers would be aware, the fuel price index has seen a 11.4% climb between January and August 2018, and this excludes the most recent monster price hike of R1 in October.<\/p>\n

Water and other related services have seen the price index grow by 10.9% – while cold beverages, which are usually packed with sugar, have seen the impact of the sugar tax, with the index climbing almost 9%.<\/p>\n

Electricity and education also saw big jumps (7.7% each), while insurance and medical services also saw big jumps.<\/p>\n

The graph below outlines the biggest increases we have seen this year.<\/p>\n

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The increases are based on the changes to the respective indices over time, where the base (index score of 100) is taken from prices in December 2016.<\/p>\n

For example, beer had an index score of 105.8 in January 2018, meaning prices were 5.8% higher than in December 2016. In August 2018, the index score had climbed to 108.4%, meaning the price of beer is 8.4% higher than in December 2016, but 2.5% higher than in January 2018.<\/p>\n

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Read:\u00a0Government asks business to hold off on price increases after another petrol hike<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South African consumers have had a rough year so far, with a VAT hike to 15% in April pushing prices up, while rising fuel prices and an economy in recession have continued to keep the pressure on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":205318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11121],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-275671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275671"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275759,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275671\/revisions\/275759"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}