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Every holiday budget gets built around the wrong number.<\/p>\n
You brace for the turkey and price out the sides. You watch the grocery total climb and decide that is where the squeeze lives.<\/p>\n
For most of the past four years that instinct was sound, because food at home carried the inflation story and the Thanksgiving table was the line item that moved.<\/p>\n
That has changed. Federal price data for September puts the table close to flat and puts the cost of reaching it up more than a fifth.<\/p>\n
Vivian Tu, the social media personal finance personality and best-selling author, pointed her readers at the right line on Sunday, and the government numbers released three weeks earlier say she is right by a wider margin than her own newsletter claims.<\/p>\n
Vivian Tu told readers on Nov. 1 to book holiday flights immediately, as airfares rose 22.4% from 2025.<\/p>\n
Thomas Barwick \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
Tu told readers to book immediately<\/p>\n
“If you haven’t booked your flight home for the holidays, I suggest you get on that ASAP,” Tu wrote in the Nov. 1 edition of her enRICHed newsletter, published on Substack under her Your Rich BFF brand.<\/p>\n
She put domestic economy round-trip Thanksgiving fares up nearly 24% year over year and international fares up roughly 33%, citing reporting by Forbes.<\/p>\n
More Travel: <\/p>\n
Air France exits entire market again<\/p>\n
American Airlines leaves empty seats while charging flyers more<\/p>\n
EasyJet will pay for your child’s first passport<\/p>\n
Those figures come from Fareportal, the travel technology company behind CheapOair and OneTravel, according to the Forbes piece, which was published Oct. 12 and updated Oct. 23.<\/p>\n
Tu runs the AI money app Ask Dolly and promotes it inside the same newsletter’s reader question section, so the advice arrives alongside a product she owns.<\/p>\n
Government data backs the fare call<\/p>\n
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put its airline fares index up 22.4% over the 12 months through September, in the Consumer Price Index release issued Oct. 14.<\/p>\n
That lands within two points of the Fareportal number Tu cited, which is unusually close agreement between a company’s booking data and a federal index.<\/p>\n
Fares also rose 1.2% in September alone on a seasonally adjusted basis, after gains of 2.2% in July and 2.7% in August, per the same release.<\/p>\n
Related: Vivian Tu sounds the alarm on a hidden tax hitting your wallet<\/p>\n
The engine is fuel. Gasoline of all types ran up 34.2% over 12 months and the full energy index gained 20.4%, with gasoline alone accounting for over half of September’s entire monthly price increase, the bureau said.<\/p>\n
Airlines have been unusually willing to protect those prices, and American Airlines (AAL) has told investors it will accept emptier planes rather than discount seats.<\/p>\n
The dinner is the cheap part<\/p>\n
PwC expects Thanksgiving to cost the average American family about $90 this year against $88 last year, Ali Furman, the firm’s consumer markets industry leader, told Good Morning America in an exclusive shared with ABC News on Oct. 15.<\/p>\n
That is a $2 increase, or 2.3%.<\/p>\n
Set the two side by side and the holiday math inverts. Airfares are climbing nearly 10 times faster than the Thanksgiving meal.<\/p>\n
The table is not uniformly cheap. Turkey will cost Americans nearly 8% more than last year and a smaller cranberry harvest pushes cranberry prices up nearly 15%, Furman told the program.<\/p>\n
Federal data corroborates the turkey figure almost exactly. The index for other uncooked poultry including turkey rose 8.4% over 12 months, per the September CPI.<\/p>\n
The offsets are real too. Butter is down 10% and cream is down 6%, Furman said, and the CPI has butter down 10.3% over the same 12 months.<\/p>\n
Food at home across the whole basket rose just 1.8% over the year, which is less than half the 3.7% headline inflation rate.<\/p>\n
At a glance<\/p>\n
12-month price changes through September 2026<\/p>\n
Airline fares: up 22.4%<\/p>\n
Gasoline, all types: up 34.2%<\/p>\n
Energy: up 20.4%<\/p>\n
Other uncooked poultry including turkey: up 8.4%<\/p>\n
Food at home: up 1.8%<\/p>\n
Butter: down 10.3%<\/p>\n
All items: up 3.7%<\/p>\n
Average hourly earnings: up 3.0%, to $37.81<\/p>\n
Personal saving rate, September: 3.8%<\/p>\n
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index and Employment Situation releases, Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income release<\/p>\n
Your pay did not keep up<\/p>\n
Average hourly earnings for private nonfarm workers reached $37.81 in September, up 3.0% over 12 months, the Labor Department reported Oct. 2.<\/p>\n
Hold that against 3.7% headline inflation and the average paycheck lost roughly 0.7 percentage points of purchasing power over the year. That subtraction is ours, not the bureau’s.<\/p>\n
Run the holiday basket through the same wage figure and the ranking is stark. Airfares rose about seven and a half times faster than pay.<\/p>\n
Gasoline rose 11.4 times faster than pay.<\/p>\n
The Thanksgiving meal is the only item on the list that rose slower than your wages, by about seven tenths of a point.<\/p>\n
The cushion is thinner at the same time. The personal saving rate fell to 3.8% in September from 4.5% in July, its lowest reading of 2026, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis release of Oct. 29.<\/p>\n
Real disposable personal income fell 0.3% in September, the same release shows, even though income in current dollars rose 0.2%.<\/p>\n
That pressure is already showing up in how people pay for the season, with some shoppers trimming groceries to fund gifts.<\/p>\n
Shipping gifts gets more expensive too<\/p>\n
Pricing for express parcel deliveries is forecast to jump 13.8% in the fourth quarter against the same quarter of 2025, according to the TD Cowen\/AFS Freight Index as reported by Reuters on Oct. 26.<\/p>\n
Ground delivery pricing is forecast up 5.8% over the same period.<\/p>\n
United Parcel Service (UPS) is charging a 29.5% fuel surcharge and FedEx (FDX) is charging 29%, Reuters reported, at an average diesel price of $6.28 a gallon.<\/p>\n
“Fuel is front and center in everybody’s consideration and, again, no real good news there,” Mingshu Bates, chief analytics officer at AFS Logistics, told the news agency.<\/p>\n
The index reports percentage changes rather than dollar amounts, because parcel costs vary by weight, size and destination.<\/p>\n
What it means for you<\/p>\n
Move your holiday cutting to transport and leave the menu alone. A 2.3% meal increase is not where your money is going.<\/p>\n
Book the flight this week rather than next. Fares gained ground in each of the last three months the bureau has measured, so waiting has carried a cost all autumn.<\/p>\n
Shift the trip off the peak days if the dates are yours to choose. Departure and return timing moves a holiday fare far more than 22.4% ever will.<\/p>\n
Buy shelf-stable ingredients now while they are on promotion, which is the one piece of Tu’s food advice the price data supports outright.<\/p>\n
Ship gifts on ground service, and buy in person where you can. The forecast gap between express and ground this quarter is eight points.<\/p>\n
Do not solve a transport problem with a credit card, because holiday card balances outlive the trip that created them.<\/p>\n
The rest of the season still has a year-end money checklist attached to it, and open enrollment closes before the first flight boards.<\/p>\n
The October price data arrives Nov. 18 and the October jobs report lands Nov. 6, which together will show whether fares kept climbing into the booking window.<\/p>\n
Watch the energy line in both. Every holiday number that is actually hurting traces back to fuel, and the Thanksgiving table is mostly a bystander this year.<\/p>\n
Related: Vivian Tu’s IPO warning lands as SpaceX buyers split by $1,851<\/p>\n
#Airfares #compared #time #year #show #sign #easing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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