"I've seen the Future!"

Our lives have been put under a 'fog' over the last few years. We have had changes that we accept, don't accept, love, hate....you name it we have gone through it and we also get sidetracked with meaningless stories of celebrities, royalty, sports figures...you name it...to make that fog that much thicker.

Besides boring news about people who don't care about you or I, there's something else that happened.

Consumers have had time to readjust their lives and create new habits. Some good, some bad but overall they have cemented some new habits.

The idea of remote work places that used to be a 'futuristic thought' is now commonplace and in some cases permanent. Home is where the purchase is.

So, if you are trying to predict the future of consumer expenditure how do you do it? Harvard Business Review and Road to recovery index group analyzed data from 500,000 credit and debit accounts with weekly access to transactions.

By combining the past credit and debit transaction patterns with consumer feedback that captures anticipated cash, credit and debit expenditures, economists and businesses can vastly improve the quality of their forecasts.

You can't predict the future but you can definitely be stronger at forecasting so you're not caught in a storm.