Are Millennials Spending Too Much Money On Coffee? (theatlantic.com) 532
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
Suze Orman wants young people to stop "peeing" away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials' squandered resources...
In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation's instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits... Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post-Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans' personal stability -- student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy -- are actually the fault of modernity's encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in. "There's a reason for this blame-the-victim talk" in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. "It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves."
That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books... [W]hen it comes to money, says Laura Vanderkam, the author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It's the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.
In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation's instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits... Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post-Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans' personal stability -- student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy -- are actually the fault of modernity's encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in. "There's a reason for this blame-the-victim talk" in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. "It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves."
That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books... [W]hen it comes to money, says Laura Vanderkam, the author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It's the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.
My coffee consumption. (Score:2, Informative)
Occasionally the free Folgers at work, and a $1.29 cappuccino from Exxon when it is freezing outside.
Re:My coffee consumption. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: My coffee consumption. (Score:5, Informative)
The whole concepts comes from baby boomers and retirement people who say if you set aside just $24 a week you can live like a king when you retire cause you will have $100k plus interest. Or some bullshit like that.
Their math doesnt add up byt it sounds good to idiots I mean baby boomers who like to think they know anything
Simple fact if you are under 50 and have less that 1 million in retirement when you retire you do not have enough.
1 broken hip something that happens to 60% of 70-80 year old is enough to wipe out 400k in retirement money. As boomers have no plan for health care once the employer plans they use their entire life is gone. They switch to medicate, and find it is underfunded just like they left it.
A deeper problem (Score:3)
Re: My coffee consumption. (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole concepts comes from baby boomers and retirement people who say if you set aside just $24 a week you can live like a king when you retire cause you will have $100k plus interest. Or some bullshit like that.
Hi there, as one of those purveyers of what you call bullshit, well, back in the day, we had people as smart os y'all. They were called....... broke.
The first part of my reply is truth laden sarcasm, the second part much less sarcastic in tone. Now - that 5 dollar - or more likely 10 dollar a day Starbucks habit. at 5 dollars a day, over a 10 year period, that comes out to $25,550 dollars without tax. Ya want two of them a day because I'm dumb and spout bullshit? that's fifty one thousand dollars. Thought I'd write that out for y'all.
Now I know this is more bullshit, but when my wife and I first got married, we lived pretty frugally. We kept our vehicles for a long time. We even lived in a gasp... mobile home for several years. We kept our furniture longer than most. We didn't go into 50-100K of debt for our wedding.
And yeah, a lot of our friends said we were stupid for living frugally. Most of them were divorced before their storybook wedding was paid off. The ones who stayed married overspent on their houses, and furniture, and even refi'ed their houses several times.
Meanwhile, we waited until the right house came on the market after saving enough for a real down payment. We also paid it off in 14 years. Today, after both of us retired, We're very comfortable. Retired at 55, and have three reiremtn accounts other than investments, and one hasen't been touched. Meanwhile most of my co-workers and friends are hitting 65 and can't afford to retire.
Okay, now to the non sarcastic part. This whole saving for the future is mostly simple math. People, especially younger ones, often think that they will somehow not age. But we all do. We have a lifespan as well.
What we have to do is look at expenses, both obvious ones and trickle expenses. Obvious is things like Mortgages, non obvious is things like that 5 or 10 dollar a day latte habit. But it does add up.
Unfortunately, probably 70 percent of us haven't figured out that a 30 year mortgage has you paying off a hella lot more than a 15 year one on the same place. Keeping a car an extra 3-4 years saves you a lot of money over the long haul. Not spending 5-10 dollars on that awesome coffee saves you a lot of money over time.
So in addition to knowing how to save or reduce expenses, find you a partner that understands that. The neat thing is if you do it right, you can throw a lot of that advice away after retirement, rather than use the genteel poverty model so many fall into. Weirdest thing some days is like I just bought a new jeep, and the biggest decision is whether to pay cash or finance it for 2 years at .9 percent interest. This isn't bragging. Its just an alternative. It was also a gamble, because if I was killed or otherwise expired before I turned 55, I would have left a lot of money unspent. I only offer an alternative.
Anyhow, it's just bullshit advice? Hard to say. Could be. Might not be. As I told some of the people I grew up with who spent money like drunken sailors because they were convinced they wouldn't be able to save enough to retire - "Huh - looks like you were completely right".
Same to young people. You will age, you will need to take care of yourself. If you think it isn't possible to do that, you are 100 percent right. But it's nothing new. People were saying that same thing a long time ago. So you take your pick, and you be you.
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A while back there was an anti-smoking commercial in which they set a Porsche on fire. The point of the commercial was you could smoke or you could have the car. It was an interesting take on those type of commercials.
One simple tip for mortgages is to switch to weekly payments from monthly payments. You take about four years off of a 25 year mortgage. As there are 52 weeks in the year you make the equivalent of 13 monthly payments. I also made prepayments whenever I came into some extra money and ended up
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I also made prepayments whenever I came into some extra money and ended up paying my house off in 12 years. It's amazing to only have to pay utilities and property tax instead of rent or a mortgage (plus those things).
Oh yes. The end of the mortgage payment is like the biggest raise you will ever get. I tried to explain to my supervisor that once my mortgage was paid off, I would be able to withstand a 50 percent pay cut with no change in lifestyle. He didn't believe me.
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Ending up with $170k after setting aside $25/wk for 42 years is $54,600 plus interest. $100k plus interest would be a much larger number, and would take just shy of 77 years of saving at $25/wk. He's right, the math deosn't add up.
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When people reference 6-7% rates of return, that usually includes inflation. Many people would be investing in a tax-deferred or tax-free retirement account. Even without one, taxes on capital gains are so low right now it's hardly worth worrying about. It does affect your investment selection, of course... not much point buying a high yield dividend stock in a taxable account.
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So, still $830,000 short of the required 1 million. Thanks for the tip, that's really useful.
Nope (Score:5, Funny)
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Wait but if they drink instant at home instead of those coffees, then in 8000 years they will save enough a deposit. If they cut down on the avocado on toast they might get on the property ladder in a mere 4000 years.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
Wait but if they drink instant at home instead of those coffees, then in 8000 years they will save enough a deposit. If they cut down on the avocado on toast they might get on the property ladder in a mere 4000 years.
Have you done the math on that? You might be surprised.
If the article is right, and the coffee is a $100/month habit, that's $1200 a year. Let's say an 18 year old starts saving that $100 a month, waits until he has $1,000, then puts it in an index fund and continues putting his $100 there every month. A conservative estimate is usually that you can get 6% capital gains a year average. Within 12 years, that's $21,458.57.
If you're willing to live in a city like the one I live in, instead of San Francisco or someplace else with extremely expensive homes, it's not difficult to find a $100k home. The above is enough for a 20% down payment, so that 18 year old could be owning his home by the time he's 30 on the coffee money alone. If he invested that on a Roth IRA, he can withdraw the contributions without penalty (because they're post tax), and can withdraw up to $10,000 of his capital gains for the purpose of going towards a first home without paying tax or penalty. So the whole thing can go right to the home.
12 years is far shorter than 8,000. If cutting the avocado off that toast can save them another $50 a month, they can get to $21,925.43 in 9 years instead of 12.
Small savings add up.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
My problem with this type of calculation is that while it is technically right, it completely ignores how personal finance typically go.
Money that is on you checking account is money that is going to get spent. Then who cares if it is on a $5/day latte, on $200/month shoes, or on a $40/week video game? Everyone is going to spend money on things that are seen as useless by someone else.
That's why one of the first tenants of personal finance is pay yourself first. You need to automate your saving directly from your paycheck. Save automatically these $200/month for you down payment in a couple of years. Save automatically 15% of your salary for retirement. Save a bit more than that when you get a one time bonus. If your employer does not support to directly split money from your paycheck, it is pretty easy to split a pay check from an online checking account.
Then blow the rest away on what makes you happy, that's what it is for. If you want to blow it is on overpriced coffee, so be it. Women have been blowing money on overpriced purses and haircuts, and men on overpriced cars and gadgets. We are all doing it...
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
You're right that if you blow all your money every month, it doesn't matter what you spent it on.
That does not imply that you have to live that way, that there is no choice. A significant portion of humans have savings, even a significant portion of poor people have savings.
When I was 4 years old, I pulled weeds for extra allowance at $3/hr. By midsummer I had $72 saved up.
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Yours is good general advice if you don't know your audience and want to provide them with an easy-to-implement quick fix, but it's far from being the best course of action one should take. The best course of action is to develop the willingness, ability, and personal discipline to actually budget one's money properly, regardless of what accounts it's in.
When my wife and I got married, her approach to budgeting matched up with what you were talking about. She'd make sure she left enough in her checking acco
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6% on $1000, really? Maybe things are very different in the US, but in the UK to get to even half that you have to keep switching your money between different 12 month introductory offers.
Also, a $100k home? Maybe three hours commute away from any decent jobs, which means them not very decent because you are effectively working 14 hours a day.
What most people do is wait for a relative to die to leave them a deposit in their will.
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The US has insurance, government pays for people over 65 and most working people have a low cost insurance option as well (at least until ObamaCare came along) but even so, your insurance generally costs less than 10-15% of your income so it doesn't even come close to scratching the taxes you pay in the EU and we also pay ~15% in taxes to cover those uninsured ones (eg. illegals and the really poor or irresponsible ones).
I've had a number of people get really sick in the family at late age, nobody has had a
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The article presents some hard data: "Millennials make up less than a quarter of the overall U.S. population, but in 2016, they drank an estimated 44 percent of the nation’s coffee. In this sense, Orman isn’t wrong about young Americans’ eagerness to sink cash into java."
That's certainly stronger data than your guess that "Some boomer journalist noticed that a high proportion of shoppers at his local Starbucks are under the age of 35"
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
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(disclaimer> I don't drink coffee)
In theory.
In practice, maybe he's on the go most of the time. Maybe he needs 5 coffees a day, or 10. Maybe it would be unwieldy and awkward to walk around with a sloshing 70 fl. oz. recipient "because it's cheaper that way".
Where I work, there's always free coffee ready in the cafeteria. Problem solved.
On a more general note, advice such as the one in TFS is retarded. There is a gazillion things people could save money off, starting with renting a smaller place further a
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On a more general note, advice such as the one in TFS is retarded. There is a gazillion things people could save money off, starting with renting a smaller place further away from the city, using public transportation instead of driving, etc., etc. That guy found one of those more controversial things and uses it to generate free publicity.
No - you aren't quite getting it. The issue is that a small matter can add up surprisingly quickly. Especially since people tend to have more than one coffee a day. Now you are talking 51 K over ten years. Do you turn your nose up at 51K?
Even then, the issue is not to not drink coffee, and to save 51 K over time. That's just the surface example.
The issue is twofold. First is small things add up. A couple Starbuck latte's a day might not seem like all that much. Over many years, it is a lot - unless yo
Re: Nope (Score:3)
In a capitalist society, if you refuse to accumulate capital, you're probably gonna have a bad time. At the very least, you are fighting to remain lower class.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now, no question that these things are well made. If you really want to blow up a $20,000 car, or stab one person [arstechnica.com], then spending $100,000 on a single-use use device is unquestionably an effective way to get that done. Maybe not an efficient way, but certainly an effective way.
That raises the question, f
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Yeah, for real! Everyone knows 'avacado toast' is what they spend all their money on!
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I drink good coffee, cook pretty well thanks, own my own car, walk wherever I feel like it, don't even order groceries online, net conn is 7 meg on a dry day, own a stack of CDs and vinyl, own my own home free and clear in the middle of the surrounding 10 acres which I also own.
Not quite who you expected ?
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You can't afford to love either, since the only way you're getting any is if you're paying cash for it. xD
Heh, $100/mo. (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, when I was in my twenties it wasn't coffee (though we did like good coffee). It was coke, smack, weed, and pills (booze was free because we were in a band) and that was closer to $100/night in 1985 dollars.
Now get the fuck off my lawn.
k.
Re:Heh, $100/mo. (Score:4, Funny)
The '70s and '80s were huge fun.
I can't find my lawn since it disappeared when Pangea split.
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Weed is cheap now, because legalization, and smack is cheap, because they let the drug companies make it now.
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Caffeine, yes. I quit the speed, kept the weed, dialed the booze way way back. Dropped the pills entirely, but I'll still screw around with psychedelics once or twice a year.
Amen, brother.
Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
If Millennials don't buy something that their parents did, they are at fault for closing of all those businesses.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
https://www.ibtimes.com/appleb... [ibtimes.com]
https://cw39.com/2018/03/21/to... [cw39.com]
https://www.thebillfold.com/20... [thebillfold.com]
If they do spend money on something that their parents did not spend as much on, they are - "peeing away millions of dollars on coffee"
Apparently, it is always their fault, because they don't act exactly like their parents.
Generations change, consumer habits change. Cater to demand, don't demand that their consumption matches your supply. The whole point of free markets is agility to changing scenarios, not act entitled to always having customers.
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I think every generation finds something to waste money on. Ormand thinks it's coffee for (post?)millennials. And she might be right.
There's nothing wrong with new generations having different purchase-preferences than old generations. It's just distressing to see them waste money just like their parents did. They should avoid old mistakes, and make new ones.
Now you're welcome on my lawn -- for a game of lawn-darts. ;-P
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There is a valid point in there though.
Add up 5$ lattes, avocado toast, 3-4 cars per household, 2 vacations trips by plane a year and then they complain that they cant afford a house.
The boomers, which I am not one of, but was raised by, owned homes, but had 1 car per family, hand me down furniture until their 40s, took vacation less than 50-100 miles away in the country and ate home cooked meals 3 times a day going to the restaurant once a month was a treat, not every day or 2 days.
Times do change and its
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Millennials don't just eat out every day or two, many of them do not even know how to cook. The only meals that aren't "eating out" are "Cup o' Soup."
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If you are not going to be able to afford anything significant then why not at least make your life a little bit nicer by eating tasty toasts or drinking lattes?
Saving (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I am essentially retired at under 50 because I was aggressive at saving when younger (and didn’t have kids). I had a 401k once eligible, and always contributed the maximum, in addition to other savings. I have long had an appreciation for the time value of money. (I did have a nasty Dr Pepper habit though that was likely close to $5/day.)
But, good finance comes down to understanding your own personal situation. If you have a mountain of debt and continue to spend on frills you will have less money when you need it. If you budget for some treats to reward yourself then that is fine.
One piece of advice though, if you spend $100/month on coffee at least buy some Starbucks stock.
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You know they're comming for you next, right? (Score:2)
But they're rapidly running out of private pension funds to raid. Next will be public. And there's been decades of anti-bureaucrat rhetoric around the world, especially in America and the UK. Pretty soon there'll be media personalities on CNN & Fox News asking w
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It is to be hoped that the US and the UK won't be an example for Europe. Good that the UK is leaving the EU, so their hard-capitalist bad influence will diminish.
In Switzerland, coincidentally, in the past 10 years the hype is "service public", i.e. the state funding decent services for the citizens, is what people are demanding. There is no anti-bureaucrat mood here, on the contrary it smells a bit too much of protecting vested interests, but I'd rather have that than the opposite.
Bureaucracy per se is not
Re:You know they're comming for you next, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bureaucracy per se is not good,
People say this, but bureaucracy is how humans organise things at scale. No one who says it's bad has ever come up with a viable alternative, yet they enjoy living in a modern society, i.e. one where things are organised at scale.
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Indeed, I applaud millennials spending their hard-earned money on a "grande" skinny soy vanilla pumpkin-spice latte. Gotta have that yield on that schweet $SBUX.
Millennials drink less booze (Score:5, Informative)
Also, Coffee sales are still down from peaks in the 1950s and 60s. Coffee is much, much lower quality too.
Finally, my kid's in college and she hits Starbucks about once or twice a month. She's literally buying a coffee flavored shake. Nobody's drinking that many of those because they hit you like a ton of bricks.
This is just more of the same crap where the older generations are pitted against the younger ones. It's just a stupid trick to divide and conquer the working class. Please, can we stop falling for it already? The trick is literally thousands of years old [goodreads.com].
Re:Millennials drink less booze (Score:4, Interesting)
This millennial likes buying properties and letting other millennials pay them off. It's how I get back at them for the childhood bullying.
Re:Millennials drink less booze (Score:5, Interesting)
they also spend about 7% less on frivolities [cnbc.com]. They also smoke less. They also buy smaller homes [businessinsider.com] or no home at all (stuck in apartments).
Of course they pend less - they have less, they're broke (as a generation).
There's a reason many of them are out on the picket lines arguing for $15/hr minimum wage and student loan forgiveness.
Re:Millennials make less money (Score:5, Interesting)
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Coffee is much, much lower quality too.
Can you back that up with a citation?
Of course not. It's only feasibly possible through the most distorted lens. I remember the 1970s quite well, and almost the tail end of the 1960s. Every church basement in Canada had a giant percolator. Even money they were brewing robusta (as seen on TV) and not even arabica. But perhaps this isn't quite as evil as I recall.
Who Cares? (Score:2)
Quit wasting our time!!!
What the fuck does Millennial cover, anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
apart from anyone younger than you that you desperately search for reasons to feel superior to.
https://xkcd.com/2165/ [xkcd.com]
Tastes Great! (Score:2)
Need something to wash down the avocado toast.
In the United States Avocados are cheap (Score:2)
Millennials? (Score:2)
Whenever I am... uh, walking near... a coffee place, I see as many or more middle aged people in line there than youngsters. And Starbucks started growing fast in the 80s and 90s - one can hardly pin that on millennials.
Orman’s probably just mad because her doctor has told her it’s a good idea to cut back on caffeine once you reach senior citizenhood, so she’s lashing out.
It is alive! (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the zombie Republican narrative: "working people got it too goddamn good, with their cell phones and coffee"
Way to fucking frame a narrative to benefit the 1%. You'll notice it's not, "The old white people these days, spending their disability checks on cable TV and oxycontin!". Next you will hear about how the blacks could pull themselves up by the bootstraps if they would just stop drinking all that grape pop.
Fuck them and fuck anyone who tries to advance these canards.
for the sake of discussion (Score:2)
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You haven't looked at the figures recently, have you? It's shifted again. In fact, there are more than one top-tier Democratic candidates who are not accepting corporate or lobbyist donations at all. They won't even do the big-dollar fund-raising events.
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"Are Millennials Spending Too Much Money On Coffee?" is an in inherently political assertion. The discussion was political before I got here.
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That's sweet of you. As long as you're up, could you get me another beer? Take one from the back, because it'll be colder.
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*laughs*
Another Pope classic.
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Joking? Either your not an American or you aren't paying attention. Americans loathe people who are less fortunate. It goes back to Calvinist days, where being poor is an indication of a moral failure.
I call it the American Civil Religion. It's Christianity in name only. "Prosperity gospel". If you got money, that means God favors you, is how a very large percentage of evangelicals think.
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Don't blame it on the Calvinists. One of the reasons for the protestant reformation was that the working class was tired of the church loving up the rich. So they swapped the idea that being rich made you a good person for the idea that not having money was because you were lazy. See the improvement?
I agree with Orman on this one. (Score:3)
$5 coffee at places like Starbucks is a great way to waste a lot of money without realizing it.
I agree that student loans are a scam, but unless politicians come up with an alternative, you're probably going to have to pay them back. That means you'd better stop wasting money on stupid stuff like $5 cups of coffee.
Every penny you don't waste gets you closer to paying off the biggest waste, student loans that you probably shouldn't have taken in the first place.
Do the math (Score:2)
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And where do yo get that 6% interest?
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How much is that 6% after capital-gains taxes and correcting for inflation?
And what use is being a millionare in the last ten years of your life when you never got to enjoy spending money during your healthy years?
(FWIW: I'm actually kind of frugal in many things, except eating out.)
Things you like are never a waste of money (Score:2)
Seriously.
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Not always true. Sometimes, advice can be given in a spirit of genuineness and love.
I agree that snarky putdowns are mostly useless.
Please, it's not like millenial's are the only one (Score:2)
Example, yournger people and older both like those special brewed beers. Myself, I do domestic. BUT, I only drink upper shelf vodka or what ever shot of the moment is.
To single out only a specific generation for what everyone does is just stupid
Yeah, probably. But... priorities. (Score:2)
It's your money to spend as you see fit. Personally, I'd rather spend 5 minutes at home brewing the brand I like the way I want at a tenth the cost and not have to deal with some snot-nosed barista or other customers. (I'm not a morning person). Plus, I drive, so I'll quote T-wax's maxim: "Any 5 minute stop on the way to work will result in a 20 minute delay in arrival time". It's a space-time vortex or something. I'd also rather take that $3/day and throw it at a good end-of-month bottle of scotch or
Let people enjoy their coffee (Score:2)
Their pursuit of Happiness.
Cold, hot, at any time, organic. Cappuccino, short black, latte.
Got loan and housing price problems?
Don't take out a huge loan.
Housing?
Lots of really nice states and cities all over the USA are lower tax, clean, low crime and more affordable.
The coffee did not make anyone take out a huge loan.
Coffee did not set your cost of housing in a city/state.
Want to do good in the "gig economy"? Have the ability and skills ne
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$0 (Score:2)
>"kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive"
I drink filtered tap water. Essentially $0. Also much healthier, less mess, less energy, less hassle, no stains/spills, no waste.
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Taking care of those precious bodily fluids?
(I've got to go watch Dr. Strangelove again.)
Damn Commie!
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Healthier is just repeated bullshit, coffee is not bad for you. That's something they taught you as a child that was untrue then and is untrue now.
And you could say "less waste" but you can't say "no waste" about filtered water. If you think filters last forever, you might not actually be drinking filtered water, but just water from a pitcher that once-upon-a-time had an active filtration device, but now just has a flow arrestor.
Make your own for 0.35 cents a cup (Score:3)
You can make espressos significantly better than Starbucks for less than a tenth the price, as follows:
This produces a double-shot to triple-shot espresso. You can add chocolate for mochas, hot water for americanos, etc.
I've done this for a decade. Not only do I spend nearly nothing, but my results are always superior to any chain coffee house brand coffees.
'Coffee drinks' (Score:5, Interesting)
20-40 grams (to your taste) of grounds in your press per 16 ounces
Heat good clean water to 190 degrees
Pour 16 ounces of water in, stir it to ensure the grounds are all good and wet
Set a timer for 8 minutes
After 8 minutes push the plunger down slow but firm, decant your coffee, add whatever you like to it
There, was that so hard? Top-tier taste for a low low price and you never have to stand in line to wait for it.
Problem not the money (Score:2)
Who cares if people spend 5$ for a coffee? You spend money not just for the product, but mainly for the service of not having to prepare it yourself. This is how all of human society works.
The real problem with latte-society is the throwaway cups, plastic tops, and spoons. Mountains of trash being generated every day. Buy your coffee if you want, but bring your own cup and spoon!
I am. (Score:2)
I probably could by a house from the money spent in cafes up to now. I'm in my late 40ies and that is no exaggeration. I've fallen prone to the "third place" mini - vacation feel rich lure off cafés way back in my early twens. At least I'm not an alcoholic or something. But coffee and sugar are drugs too, that's why Starbucks and Co are such good business.
Coffee is a cheap social activity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Orman is right that controlling spending habits starts with small expenses like fancy coffee.
Citation please...
Just about any book on house budgeting and/or behavior modification. One key to success is to start small.
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I finally caved and started spending the $30 a month for QuickBooks
Think about how much coffee you could have had instead.
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Fish rot from the head. Don't ask people to respect the rules while the leaders rob everything in sight.
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Because the ability to hear the command to leave the building would have nullified the laws of physics and the firefighters could have evacuated the building once the commander issued the call?
Fuck your ignorant conspiracy theory.
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Re: In other news, they're drinking less booze (Score:5, Interesting)
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My parents daily smoking and drinking habits were rather expensive compared to my coffee and occasional drink. Maybe I will come out further ahead with medical bills, they both had cancer...
Notice how you have to bundle a second, more expensive, unrelated expense to your parent's coffee bill to make it seem similar to yours?
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Nerd piss away money on $5 Latte.
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So cigarettes take the place of both food and drink? Fascinating.
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Yeah, but they had a lot fun those four years in college - it's just a shame it will take them ten years to pay off that party!
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I buy roasted coffee beans from the supermarket, $6 for a 2-pound bag during one of their specials (I get a couple of bags, enough to last until the next special). Every morning, I put two scoops of beans in my $15 blade grinder, and then brew it in my $30 drip type coffee maker. The carafe broke, but I just put my cup directly under the nozzle.
It may not the best coffee in the country, but it gets me going in the morning. Usually, I'm on my computer anyway, not really paying attention to subtle flavors of
Re:Millennials vs Social Security (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, you're saying you think that "medicare for all" would give medicare to... old people? Who already get it?
Grampy, do you remember what medicare is? That's who already pays for your nurse!
I feel like there is something I'm supposed to remind you about your meds, but I can't remember.
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In the old days they used to claim that coffee caused ulcers and shortened your lifespan, if you think finger-wagging about the price is "coffee shaming" you just have no fucking clue.
OK, let's move on to Capitalism (Score:2)