Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers, and millionaires!
In talk radio, hosts often have a list of topics they use to generate phone calls.
Hot button issues such as abortion for general talk show hosts. Or, in sports radio—the area where I spent roughly ten years yapping—proposing a crazy trade for your city’s favorite team.
The best talk show hosts reject this approach. They realize callers aren’t the star of the show. The host—the personality—is. To get quality calls, you need quality content. Not old and tired tactics to light up the phones. If you relate to people, they respond.
It’s not all that different writing about personal finance.
When you discuss the latte effect, you get a rise out of people. Because everybody has an opinion. Often a passionate one.
The latte effect being if you spend $5 a day on coffee, you’re spending $150 a month, or $1,800 a year, which, after 30 years at a 6% rate of return, you’ll have a $152,643 nest egg.
Here’s the difference from the talk radio example—you can actually get something out of discussions over the latte effect whereas you most always end up chasing your tail (and losing friends) when you argue over abortion or the value of Josh Allen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about coffee lately.
Here are some nuggets—
As with most money-related decisions we make, it’s personal.
On one hand, if you’re not making ends meet, you probably shouldn’t spend $150 a month on anything you don’t need, let alone coffee.
If you make ends meet, it depends on a lot. Maybe you get something out of the daily coffee ritual. Maybe $150 a month means nothing to you. Or maybe a mix of both.
Or—maybe, maybe—you need or want $1,000 in six months. Not going to the coffee shop will get you there. Just a quick shift like this in your pots of money saving strategy produces relatively fast results.
Do what works for you. Ultimately, it’s all about putting yourself in a position to be able to spend freely alongside ample savings once you’re making decent or better money.
I go back and forth
I have decided to mostly avoid the coffee shop in December and January.
I do this often. It serves multiple purposes.
It switches up my routine. There’s more to this than meets the eye.
Too often we negatively associate spending with psychology and emotion. Like you spend to show off your status or make yourself feel better. We tend to position spending as superficial and compulsive, rather than what it is—a key element of modern human existence. Like it or not.
How about we spin it positively?
When you shift or eliminate spending, you ultimately change your daily patterns.
It keeps you from getting into a rut. Because the coffee shop isn’t part of my morning walk the way it has been over the past few months, I take a different route. See new things. Shift my perspective. Even if you spend the same money elsewhere, you have replaced one event, one behavior, one experience—one whatever—with something else.
Just walking in a different direction can open possibilities you might not even know existed in your neighborhood.
At the same time, my partner and I plan to spend February in Spain and Italy where coffee will take center stage, particularly in Rome, where I can’t wait to have a morning cappuccino and cornetto at Bar San Calisto!
If I can save a few hundred bucks and put it towards the trip, this takes pressure off of my travel fund and allows my checking account cash cushion to absorb more of the expense.
This makes it easier—practically and psychologically—to take the time off.
So, it’s situational.
For me, I have been dropping $52 a month on an unlimited coffee subscription. However, once they get you in the door, it’s not difficult for them to hook you for a $5 pastry plus tip. The subscription does help you spend less, but you’re still spending.
So I put the subscription on hold and changed my morning and spending routines. There’s real benefit here. Plus, it will make the ritual feel fresh when I go back to it or some form of it in 2023.
There’s nothing inherently wrong—obviously—with saving $150 or so a month. There is something wrong with shaming yourself—and others—for spending it if you have it.
On that note, I have a publishing strategy I think you’ll like for the Never Retire newsletter in February during my travels, which will bring us into March on strong footing.
I will write a post in the next couple of days outlining it.
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As I noted the other day—
It has been was a nice November for the Never Retire newsletter. We have grown grew paid subscribers to 111. That’s up from 93 at the end of October. Good for a 19.3% increase.
Here’s my intention and humble pitch to you to upgrade or join as a paid subscriber:
I hope and intend to write this newsletter forever.
As you know, I will Never Retire so, when I say forever, I mean forever. When the time comes like (hopefully) 50 years or so from now and you don’t hear from me for more than a week, it probably means I’m dead. (True, but also meant to be a joke!)
My 3-to-5-year Never Retire plan—maybe less, if I’m lucky—is to only write this newsletter. This means no more private clients (I usually have one or two I’m writing for most of the time) and very little, if any writing on other platforms.
So, you’re taking my journey with me, using it and everything I write about and we discuss to help inform your own personal financial journey.
Being a paid member is about more than eliminating the paywall, it’s about supporting the existence of a newsletter I plan to write forever. It helps support one illustration of a Never Retire strategy.
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