And the index that sets your raise was never built from your basket.‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 
BOOMERS TRADE
Andrew James reporting. 64, and counting.
The trip budget went first
The government publishes what households actually spend, one age bracket at a time. The 2024 tables came out in December, and the line for people our age moved in a direction the travel industry has not been talking about.
The first aisle is emptying on schedule.
Interest in going places held up fine. The dollars doing the going are the problem.
Three hundred and twenty-five dollars. That is what a household aged sixty-five to seventy-four cut from its entertainment budget last year. One line, twelve months.
Entertainment is the Labor Department’s bucket for the discretionary part of a life. The fun money. Tickets, the boat, the greens fees, the trip. You cut it when something else needs the cash.
It fell 9.4% in a single year.
$3,447
Entertainment spending, households aged 65 to 74, in 2023
 
$3,122
The same line, the same households, in 2024
Inside that line, fees and admissions fell from $724 to $656. Tickets and greens fees and gate charges, down sixty-eight dollars a household in twelve months.
And that is the nominal number. The dollars left in the line still had to buy 2024 prices.
So the real cut is deeper than the table shows. How much deeper depends on which basket of prices you use, and that turns out to be a live argument in Washington.
Congress told the Labor Department to build us our own index back in 1987. It exists. It is called the research price index for Americans sixty-two and older. It weights medical care and shelter the way our households actually spend.
It runs hotter. About two tenths of a point a year hotter, by the Congressional Budget Office’s reckoning. From late 1982 to late 2011 it climbed 142.8% while the headline index climbed 131.2%.
Your annual raise runs off a different index. By law the cost-of-living adjustment uses the wage earners’ basket. Two tenths of a point, compounded across a thirty-year retirement, is the whole ballgame.
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One year is one year. A survey has error bars. The direction is the part worth your afternoon, because that money went somewhere.
Follow the household forward. Entertainment runs $3,706 at fifty-five to sixty-four. It runs $3,122 at sixty-five to seventy-four. Healthcare climbs from $6,711 to $7,918 across those same brackets.
One line goes down. One line goes up. They are the same wallet.
This is the handoff between the first two aisles, showing up in a government table.
 
Travel
The aisle the tables just measured on its way out. Down $325 a household in a year.
 
Health & Housing
The cohort is here this quarter
Where the $325 went. This line rises through every bracket in the table and never turns back down.
 
Longevity
Next in front of the money
Spending meant to keep the first aisle open a few more seasons.
 
Estate
What the unspent trip turns into, eventually, on somebody else’s balance sheet.
The industry read on our cohort is a decade of blue-water cruises and bucket lists. The tables say the discretionary line already turned. The second version comes with a date attached.
Who is already standing there
The one collecting is the operator who sells the small trip close to home. The three-night riverboat out of a river town nobody flies to. The motorcoach that leaves from a church parking lot at six in the morning. The lakeside place that fills in October at half of August money. Their ticket is falling and their bus is full, because a household trimming $325 does not stop going. It goes shorter and it goes nearer.
The catch is that a shrinking ticket is a brutal business to run. Fuel, drivers and insurance hold their price. And if the discretionary line keeps falling, the cheap trip is next on the list to go.
One word back, if you have a minute. Over the last twelve months, has your own travel budget gone up or down? Reply with up or down and nothing else. I will run the count next week against the government’s.
The arithmetic
All spending figures are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2024 tables, released 19 December 2025, by age of the reference person. Entertainment for households aged 65 to 74: $3,447 in 2023 and $3,122 in 2024. Fees and admissions inside that category: $724 in 2023 and $656 in 2024. Entertainment at 55 to 64: $3,706 in 2024. Healthcare: $6,711 at 55 to 64 and $7,918 at 75 and older, 2024. The $325 decline and the 9.4% figure are Boomers Trade’s own arithmetic on those tables. The research price index for Americans sixty-two and older, formerly the experimental CPI-E, was directed by Congress in 1987 under P.L. 100-175 and is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a research measure; BLS cautions that it is experimental, that its sample is roughly a quarter of all consumer units, and that conclusions from it should be treated as tentative. Its rise of 142.8% from December 1982 to December 2011, against 131.2% for the CPI-U, is from BLS. The roughly two tenths of a percentage point a year average gap is the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate. Cost-of-living adjustments are set by statute using the CPI-W. A single survey year carries sampling error, and one year is not a trend on its own. The read on who profits is Boomers Trade’s own.
 
The 2025 tables land next December, and they will settle whether one year was a wobble or the corner. Watch the fees and admissions line inside them. It is the smallest number in this letter and the first one to move.
Sixty-eight dollars a household. That is one round of golf, or one afternoon at a ballpark, that stopped happening.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.

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