Scott Krauss

Bio

I'm Scott Krauss, the founder of Aspire.

By day I lead go-to-market strategy at Zeta Global, the latest chapter in 15-plus years of enterprise sales and strategy. That work taught me to distrust any single number that claims to summarize something complicated.

Bitcoin is what first pulled me down the macro rabbit hole. Not as an investment thesis, but as a question: what actually is money, and why does the life I want keep getting more expensive faster than the official inflation number admits? That question turned into an obsession with inflation, and then with the thing underneath it: the affordability crisis quietly redrawing what an ordinary American life costs.

Aspire is my answer to it. CPI says prices rose about 3%. The house, the degree, the freedom to stop working: those compound at very different rates, and almost nobody measures the gap. So I built the tool I wanted, one that prices the life you actually want against the path you're actually on. I'm not here to sell you a fund or a forecast. I'm here to make the math impossible to misunderstand while there's still time to act on it.

What I do here

Scott is Aspire's author and methodology owner, accountable for the numbers on this site and how they're computed.

Areas of focus

• goal inflation
• future affordability
• personal inflation rate
• compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
• monetary policy and inflation
• housing, education and healthcare cost trends

Editorial standards

How Aspire sources its numbers. Aspire runs on public, named data, not opinion. Every rate traces to a specific series: home prices from S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller and Zillow ZHVI, equity returns from the S&P 500, costs from BLS CPI-U components and College Board tuition data. Each figure carries its trailing window and the date it was retrieved. The data refreshes weekly, the methodology is reviewed quarterly, and corrections are logged in the open. What Aspire is not: it isn't investment advice, it doesn't recommend securities or allocations, and it doesn't predict markets. Every rate is paired with the assumptions behind it, because a number without its assumptions is just a guess in a suit. Full method on the methodology page; common questions in the FAQ.