One inflation rate is the rate at which cost of living is going up for a middle-class family. That's not the CPI, because the CPI is a manipulated market basket set by a politician or a bureaucrat that is engineered not to go up in price very fast. Most average people would find that their inflation rate is higher than the CPI. For example, we don't include the cost of buying a home in the CPI, even though it stands to reason that just about any reasonable person would want to buy a house at some point in their life.