Go Ahead and Enjoy Your Coffee!

I feel like it is high time for me to stick up for a drink that has somehow become associated with wasting too much of your retirement money and holding you and me back from becoming millionaires.

Now hear this Millennial readers: I am middle aged and have been hearing and reading the same things that all the millennial money bloggers have been writing about as if it is new and groundbreaking.  People like Warren Buffet, John Bogle and hypesters like Suze Orman, Jim Cramer and Dave Ramsey have been saying the same things for decades.

Over the past twenty-three years since I first became an investor at the age of twenty-four, I have heard the example of bypassing coffee and investing the funds instead many times.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard or read this advice, I would have...well, probably a few bucks.  

I last heard again it while driving to the library around Noon about a month ago on the Noon Business Hour of WBBM when Marc Horner of Fairhaven Capital Management and Million Dollar Cup of Coffee was spouting the usual.

I checked out his website, and you can look at it too and see that it is just a long scroll down about investing $4 per day from the age of twenty instead of buying fancy Moccachino latte drinks at Starbucks for forty-five short years and, Viola!  You’ll become a millionaire just in time to die.

That is, if you can survive that long without coffee.

As much as I hate picking on a drink that I both love and am admittedly highly addicted to, it got me thinking a bit about how much I have spent in the past and currently spend on this nectar of the Gods that I crave first thing in the morning much like a junkie craves heroin.

Whether it is in one of the numerous magazines that I subscribe to, websites that I follow and books that I have read, they all eschew this part of life that us true coffee lovers find to help make life worth living.  Instead of the fifteen bucks that I spent last week, I should have downed the swill at my office instead and invested an extra fifteen bucks into my IRA.  Of course, me being forty-seven years old already, that fifteen bucks would only have a chance to grow to twenty-three by the time I reach sixty-five, or just enough to pay for my coffee consumption for that week.  I made up the twenty-three bucks number, but it sounds about right.

As I have previously divulged, I am not the most frugal person or head of the most frugal family that you could read about in the blogosphere.  What good does it do me to save fifteen bucks on coffee in a week if my wife spends a hundred times that amount on food, clothing, entertainment plus a few unnecessary items here and there?  Or after I pay $3,000 in property taxes and another $2,500 to our son’s college? I prefer a harmonious marriage over quarreling over spending and I admit guilt in terms of indulging our two children as much as I can. 

But what about the coffee?

First of all, you could count on one hand how many times per year I buy Starbucks for myself.  I did buy it a few times lately due to having a few gift cards from Christmas left over.  More importantly to Starbucks, my fourteen-year-old daughter has started patronizing the amazing coffee chain over the past few months, often with her high school-aged friends.  What is even more startling to me is that she believes a five dollar specialty drink to be no big deal.

I could tell her how my father’s father grew up in boys’ homes and foster homes without a family after his father abandoned them and his mother lost custody of her children due to mental health and financial issues.  For him, five dollars during the Depression was like having a hundred dollars or more today.

Well, her friends are all members of the upper middle class and think nothing of spending fifty bucks at the mall on a Friday night including five or more at Starbucks.

My wife and I, we are Dunkin’ Donuts people through and through.  My wife buys bags of the product and sets the timer on our Mr. Coffee every weekday at 6:00 a.m. sharp and brews it as we wake up on weekends.  We go many months having this coffee every single morning.

I probably consume three to four cups every morning before I leave home and fill my commuter mug for the twenty-five minute drive into work. 

You would think that would be enough, but no.

As I roll into the town that I work for, I often crave additional caffeine.  I want to have something that smells and tastes great in my hand and helps me get through the first hour or more of the day.

A typical week of my "extra" coffee includes Dunkin' Donuts, 7-Eleven and McDonald's.

For that reason, it has become my habit to either go through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through on my way to the office, stop at 7-Eleven for an additional coffee, or go through a McDonald’s drive-through every so often.  As I mentioned, I have even patronized that super-expensive place that every financial guru is referring to when they talk or write about saving four or five bucks per day.

I should mention that there are also two independent coffee places that I sometimes go to.  I love patronizing those places more, but they always take longer because I know the owners, neither have a drive-thru, and most days I just want to get my drink and be on my way.

Some other day, I will regale my readers with the tale of how I cam to start drinking coffee and then continually increased my consumption over the years to sometimes downing eight cups per day.

I know...fascinating.

Similar to the way smokers, big drinkers and drug addicts bond over their common addiction, I have spoken at length with many coffee drinkers and addicts like myself about what type they prefer, how much they drink and if they patronize any particular independent coffee houses or specialty blend that can only be found in certain places.

I should add that as a long-time economic development guy, I worked with several different independent coffee purveyors.  Over the long thirteen years that I have been in my current position, I have worked with and befriended four independents who have since gone out of business and two who have not.  One of them is in the same location where two others had previously failed.

Because both of them that remain in business are typically manning or "womaning" the shop when I come in, they typically lay out their problems to me whether or not I feel like hearing them.  With enough problems and challenges of my own, I really do not want to hear theirs first thing in the morning when I simply require more of the drink that I crave to make it through the morning.


For that reason, I often prefer to roll through the drive-through at Dunkin' or pop into the local 7-Eleven than chat with them about things for ten minutes.  I know, I know.  It is better to patronize mom-and-pop businesses, especially ones that you helped talk into opening in your town.  Also when you, yourself, promote mom-and-pop shopping on a regular basis.
Per a CBS News article on the matter, "A cup of coffee a day, exposure probably is not that high," and probably should not change your habit, said Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "If you drink a lot of cups a day, this is one of the reasons you might consider cutting that down."

Also, after I began this post but before hitting the "publish" button, I read many articles about the State of California having recently passed a new law that requires warning labels that coffee contains a chemical that is known to cause cancer.  Like many foods that are cooked, coffee-roasting creates a chemical byproduct called acrylamide that classified as a carcinogen.  

The greatest quote that I came across on this topic is from Robert A. Weinberg, an oncologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who acknowledges that "Coffee is connected to cancer development by the fact that coffee is sometimes drunk by living people and only living people develop cancer."

I suppose the same reasoning could be applied to anything from smoking cigarettes to ingesting crystal meth or playing Russian Roulette.  Oh well, what do you expect from a Fox News article anyway?

Google "coffee cancer" if you would like to read many more articles on the topic, but my guess is that you have already heard this news several times.


So What About the Money?

Coffee, like most things in this world, costs money.

From the poor farmer in Kenya or Columbia who picks it, to the businesses that ship it, to the roasters who prep it, to the shippers who send it out, to the wholesalers who sell it, to the traders who trade it, to the Starbucks fanatics who compulsively purchase overpriced specialty drinks to the old folks and office workers who drink Folgers, it all costs money, dinero, geld, pieniadze or however you say the word.

Would you be able to save a substantial amount of currency if you forgo coffee from the time you are twenty years old and invest the entire amount in mutual funds?

You betcha!

Could the same be said if you never purchased a beer the entire time?  Never attended a movie or concert?  Went out to eat fifteen times per month instead of twenty-five?

Yes, yes and yes.

The bottom line that I want to impart on this topic is the same that I would say whether you like to drink, smoke, gamble, vape or collect bobble head dolls.

That one word is moderation.

If you make fifty grand or less, this Money Mensch finds it irresponsible to spend five bucks per day on a grande double mocha latte nonfat decaf with foam whipped cream and Nutrasweet or some similar ridiculous drink.

Ridiculous considering that in your place of work, you probably have crappy cheap coffee provided as part of your employment, like I do.

Here I confess that for the first twelve-plus years of my employment at my current place of work, I more or less refused to drink the swill provided in my office.  So you do not think that I will endorse anything for the sake of clicks, this coffee that I hate is Folgers.  Whoever brews it typically adds one heaping spoonful of the stuff for every cup of water, thus making it about twice as strong as I prefer.  At home, we put in six heaping spoonfuls for a full twelve-cup pot.

I also confess that besides the three or so cups that I drink every morning before walking out my door, plus the commuter mug full of coffee, I have purchased coffee "outside of home" approximately eighty percent of the time for the past fifteen or so years, skipping maybe one day per week for whatever reason.  Usually because I am running too late to stop.

My typical purchase ranged anywhere from about two bucks to three-fifty for a large iced coffee drink from Dunkin' on sunny Fridays when I am in a good mood and feel like splurging a bit.

I get Starbucks five to ten times per year, typically after someone gives me or my wife a gift card during the holiday season, knowing that we are coffee fanatics and, thus, assuming that we patronize the most profitable, amazing coffee chain that there ever was.

But hearing Marc Horner on the radio a few weeks ago and thinking about the thousands that I have spent on that "one extra coffee" per day since about Y2K got me thinking again.  Even though I have read and heard this thinking about coffee at least a hundred times prior, I have not really heard or thought about it since launching the Money Mensch blog.

So I took some action.

What a concept.  Not just thinking, talking or writing, but taking action.  The action is very small, like taking a baby step, but take that step I did.

On March first, over a month ago, I decided to eliminate the "extra" coffee that I was purchasing on my way to work or soon upon my arrival.  I did not resolve to never purchase one again, knowing that is unlikely, but curtailing it as much as possible.

Having become a sporadic shopper at Aldi, I purchased a French vanilla creamer a few days later for about two bucks, so as to make the Folgers at work drinkable.  If you are counting pennies, I did spend two bucks rather than zero on this.

The creamer has survived the month of March but will have to be replaced by the end of this week.  So I have been using it to drink the swill that is provided in our Village Hall's break room.  Besides the creamer, I have also been adding ice to it, further diluting the extra-strong bitter taste of the brew provided to us worker bees.

The last week of February, I stopped at 7-Eleven four times and Starbucks once for "extra" coffee.

Throughout the month, I did purchase coffee outside of home or the office twice.  Once was a desperate need for coffee outside the workplace on the Friday before I took a week of to go to NOLA with my son.  I did patronize one of the two remaining independent purveyors in our downtown and, yes, I did get an earful of complaints from her.  She does not know it, but I will not be returning to that business until she or her husband ultimately call me to come meet with them for whatever problem they will be experiencing.

The second time was the Tuesday of our trip to NOLA, when my sister was already at work and her husband had not yet returned from his business trip.

Having previously reported that their family is of the upper middle class variety, it should not surprise you to know that they have a coffee/espresso machine that you might find in a gourmet coffee house.  It is a Bosch Tassimo.

My sister and her husband purchase organic beans from Whole Foods, grind them at home, and then brew whatever blend it is that they buy.

What I did not know was that my sister had cued it up for me already so all I had to do was turn the power on and then hit the start button.  

What I did was walked over to what had long been an independent coffee house and is now one outlet of the previously mentioned overpriced chain, just a few blocks from their home at the corner of Freret and Jefferson.  It was still an independent called Village Coffee just a few months ago.

The giant chain took over this independent coffee house a few weeks ago.

I was still in possession of a gift card, so it did not really feel like paying, anyway, and my sister looked at me like I was a moron when I confessed patronizing the chain rather than hitting the "brew" button on her coffee maker.

But I am back here now.  I do not plan on even spending the two to three dollars three or four days per week like I used to.  Rather than invest an extra forty or fifty per month into my IRA and say that it is in place of purchasing that extra coffee, I am instead thinking of it as crawling forty or fifty dollars closer to breaking even with earning and spending during any given month.

Will it reduce my coffee consumption?  Maybe by a cup or two per week, but I plan on just continuing consuming the swill from our break room instead of spending those extra few bucks.

If you happen to have read this far and you are still in your twenties or thirties, I am not going to chastise you for purchasing coffee and not investing enough.  For some true coffee addicts lovers like us, you may not be able to survive your workday mornings without it.  Those extra milligrams of caffeine help us survive our hectic mornings, not to mention that the stuff tastes fantastic and there is nothing else like it on cold mornings in the Midwest.

But must you throw away twenty or more bucks per week at the overpriced place with its own language that one of the best business men ever purchased and brought to such prominence?

I will come across as lecturing as my answer is a definite Yes.

If you must purchase a tasty coffee treat every morning, seek out other places like the Golden Arches, 7-Eleven or my personal favorite, Dunkin' Donuts.  Seek out an independent place where you get to know the owner and they get to know your preferences.

Brew your own, whether it is Dunkin' brand that you brew in a $20 Mr. Coffee machine like my wife and I do or whether it is highly priced organic Fair Trade coffee from Whole Foods brewed in a fancy Bosch Tassimo.

Whatever it is, use that noggin that God gave you when it comes to how much to spend and how much to drink.  If it really causes cancer then I, along with millions and millions of others, and am extreme danger.  I must have consumed gallons of coffee per week for the past seventeen years.  Cutting back a cup or two per week won't help much at this point.

But one thing that I am and will continue doing is spending less on this addiction  wonderful drink that keeps me going most mornings.

So let the Money Mensch be the one to tell you, if nobody else has, to go ahead and Enjoy Your Coffee.

Just don't go broke doing it.