Would You Rather Have Starbucks Or $700?

Choose right now… Starbucks or $700? Not Coffee or $700. Just Starbucks. Choose. Now.

Starbucks is in the news a lot. They are either opening their first store in Milan (highly suggest clicking on that link, the pictures are crazy), having trouble in Philadelphia, or boosting their stock price due to another great quarter. At one point there weren’t enough Starbucks stores in the United States to serve the demand for their coffee, and that was only last summer!

You’re probably saying that’s crazy because if you live in a major city it seems like there are multiple Starbucks on every block. You’d be right.

Now, we’ve seen a lot of the articles about how millennials could have so much more money or even be a millionaire if they cut out all their “trendy” food items such as avocado toast. A certain Australian millionaire even said the reason millennial aren’t millionaires is because of their avocado toast addiction. We saw some articles where the math was done and we even did it ourselves and found the idea a little far fetched. But it did get us thinking. Is there anything about our consumption habits that really do mess with our personal finances?

Absolutely. Besides the fact we rely so heavily on credit cards and think when something is on sale we “saved” money when in reality we really just spent less but our caffeine habits really do damage our personal finances. I’ll be the first one to admit I got Starbucks and Dunkin or whatever coffee was available to me in college almost every day. That was on top of my Keurig or Mr. Coffee (depending on what year I was in college) that I would make most days. Looking back, I wasted so much money on coffee.

I read recently that the average Starbucks order is $2.75 in the US and in NYC it’s $3.75. Most people I know stop for coffee at least once a day, usually on their way to work, every weekday. So 52 weeks in a year means 260 work days, we’ll be liberal here and say you get 15 vacation days you take full advantage of so 245 working days a year. We’ll go even further beyond that and say at least another 15 of those you’re running late and don’t get to stop to get your caffeine fix, now we’re at 230 days a year. Sounds like a lot but it’s pretty common for coffee drinkers to have at least a cup every day, specifically every morning, if not more than that. So some quick math of 230 days x $2.75 for an average order and you get $632.50 a year that you’re wasting on over priced, over roasted coffee.

Now I get it, if you’re addicted to caffeine like I am when you need coffee, you need coffee. Most likely your work has a coffee machine somewhere that you can get for free so let’s discount the entire working day and only focus on your mornings.

I personally bought a Mr. Coffee very similar to this one and use it every single day. The Mr. Coffee shown above costs $35.96 or just around 13 cups of coffee at Starbucks. Now for anyone who is going to say that they don’t have time to wake up and make coffee, I wake up at 4:50am and program this wonderful machine the night before to start making coffee at 4:45am, so not only do I have a fresh cup of coffee right when I wake up, I also get to wake up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and honestly there’s nothing better than that.

I don’t even buy filters, my Mr. Coffee like the one I referenced above comes with permanent reusable filter that I just rinse out every night and put right back in. And you can pick something up like this Byron Stainless Steel Travel Mug for less than $10 and now you’re in business. Total outlay so far: $45.96 or less than 17 cups of coffee at Starbucks.

The last thing you’re going to need is coffee and this is where the real savings kicks in. You can do what I do and drink Maxwell House Original Blend Ground Coffee which sells on Amazon for $6.93. There is 240 6 fluid ounce cups in this thing! Conveniently happens to be just around the amount of cups we estimated the average person to need to go to work. That’s so much coffee. That’s less than 3 cents per cup of coffee! If you want to follow the famous Shark Tank Invest Kevin O’Leary you can take your $2.72 in savings and invest them.

Adding all this up that’s around $53 a year for your coffee addiction in the first year and it only goes down from there. Drink more than one cup a day at home? Raise your cost by $10 to $20 depending on what type of coffee you choose to order.

Some of you are going to say that all of this isn’t worth it. The daily expense is minimal on a daily basis and you don’t notice the overall sum you spend. I get it. Like I said before I have been there. But once I realized what was happening and how much I was spending my habits completely changed. The small daily expenses truly add up and turn into major expenditures. Don’t let this happen.

Take that extra $700 or more every year and invest that money or put it into your savings account and let that money grow. You’ll still be having your coffee fix every day, but you’ll be getting it in a way that allows you to minimize your expenses and optimizes your savings.

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