> More time to enjoy life!

What if I enjoy life by buying a fancy coffee & drinking it on my walk to work?

The downside of your formulation of "why buy coffee? you could be enjoying life instead!" is that this worldview encourages people to feel guilty about buying coffee. Extreme frugality has its place, but remember that "your life" that you have to enjoy isn't something that starts in 5 years or 10 years or once you save $x, it's what's happening right now, all the time. I might not be alive in 5 years, none of has that guarantee. So I enjoy my coffee.

It sounds like you enjoy frugality for its own sake which is fantastic, and more power to you. But I think most personal financial planners would suggest that you have a goal you're working towards rather than "hoard cash." What's the point of that? "Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with" figure out what that "something more interesting" is and it might make sense to forgo your daily coffee. Hoarding cash is not a goal.

> If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro.

Yippee! I'm 85 years old (assuming I haven't died already) and I have an extra €55k. Am I allowed to drink coffee now?

Yeah, but how fancy is the fancy coffee though? Are we talking Starbucks or a three day roast sourced from a micro lot in Kenya?

If it fits your budget, go for it, but let's not confuse convenience with enjoyment or quality.

I say this in order to share constructive feedback, because I know a lot of people on HN are not great at "tone" and sometimes appreciate an explanation why their comment might accidentally offend:

This comment is very condescending and pointlessly critical. You suggest that I do not know how to enjoy coffee correctly, and am instead perhaps "confusing convenience with enjoyment." Rest assured that, I, along with basically everyone, can be trusted to know what they themselves enjoy or do not enjoy, without your advisement.

To clarify, I am using "fancy" as a shorthand for "expensive," i.e. a $5-6 coffee rather than a $2 coffee.

> Hoarding cash is not a goal.

Especially considering the inflation tax. Especially lately.

And money should be making more money after the $5000 point.

Yeah... well... I'm terrible at that. Recently I learn many more purchases can simultaneously be investments. The topic now makes me wonder if this 7000$ vintage espresso machine is robust enough for another 20 years of service. https://coffeemachinewarehouse.com.au/product/gaggia-vintage...

It looks more solid than fiat?

> What if I enjoy life by buying a fancy coffee & drinking it on my walk to work?

haha, are you asking for my permission here? We are different people! Thank god! Imagine if our hard worked grand-design for life turned out exactly the same. Now that would be truly terrible.

> this worldview encourages people to feel guilty about buying coffee.

I don't feel guilty when I don't, I feel stupid when I do.

> Extreme frugality has its place, but remember that "your life" that you have to enjoy isn't something that starts in 5 years or 10 years or once you save $x, it's what's happening right now, all the time.

Right, dopamine is going to happen. Don't worry about it. I resist the cravings also because I don't want to become an instinct and emotion driven creature.

> I might not be alive in 5 years, none of has that guarantee. So I enjoy my coffee.

If you skip this one the next one will taste at least twice as good. Eventually you sit there clamping onto the cup with both hands and making conversation with it.

The thing with bodies is that they always want something. There is no end to it! (haha)

> It sounds like you enjoy frugality for its own sake which is fantastic, and more power to you. But I think most personal financial planners would suggest that you have a goal you're working towards rather than "hoard cash."

Of course! They wouldn't have a job if they didn't!

> What's the point of that?

I'm not hoarding cash. There is no point in that for me!

> "Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with" figure out what that "something more interesting" is and it might make sense to forgo your daily coffee.

I just want to be able to live without ever worrying about money.

> Hoarding cash is not a goal.

Money doesn't make you happy but a lack of it is just awful. Hoard enough until it stops making sense.

> > If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro. > Yippee! I'm 85 years old (assuming I haven't died already) and I have an extra €55k. Am I allowed to drink coffee now?

haha, thanks for that. I can live comfortably on 1000 euro so the 55 k would allow me to reduce my earnings to 500 euro for 110 months spread out over the 50 years or 11 months every 60 months. If I brutally cut 5 more corners like this I could spend most of the 50 years reading HN poke peoples mind like this (and better)

Thanks for just saying what you think.

I agree with the "I will teach you to be rich" (it's a book) approach a bit more than "i can't buy a $5e coffee daily".

Their approach is more like a performance engineer. You look at the biggest costs first and reduce it down. I.e. Ask for a raise, refinance your place, find a cheaper place to rent, etc.

When you get down to the coffee you would be faced with: is it cheaper to make good quality coffee, or am I paying for the experience?

Personally I tend to view these re-occurring costs and I try to look at a way I can amortize them over a longer period of time. It's easier to justify the cost of a 200+$ espresso maker if I'm really that big of a fan and already have a defined habbit.

I love the IWTYTBR philosophy too. My favorite part is the concept of "guilt-free spending". Once you get the "big wins" down like you talked about, you can set aside 15-20% of your monthly net income to be spent any way you like. This seems intuitive at face value, but the example Rami uses with buying a $150 pair of cashmere sweatpants brings it home. It was inside his $500/month or whatever "guilt-free spending" budget, so it doesn't matter if it was a good deal or not. You just have to want it. He says his friends all commented how it was a dumb purchase and he could have gotten regular sweatpants for $20 instead, but that's missing the point.

I've taken the same approach, and this month some of my guilt-free spend went to a nice burr coffee grinder to replace my old blade one. But I'm not going to try to calculate the amortized joy per $ or long-term savings I'll get out of it, I just love brewing coffee, this makes it better, and I could afford it.

>Once you get the "big wins" down like you talked about, you can set aside 15-20% of your monthly net income to be spent any way you like.

In fact, I think no matter what your budget is like, it's important to have at least some "doesn't have to be justified" budget set aside, even if it's just $5 a month. If your monthly "doesn't have to be justified" budget is $5, and you decide to blow that $5 on an expensive coffee every month, that's perfectly OK and you shouldn't feel guilty.

I think there's a distinction to be made between "guilt-free" and "dumb/wasteful" spending. I can totally understand spending $150 on a pair of sweatpants if they "bring you joy" and are useful and will last you a decent amount of time. But just because you're willing and able to spend your money without guilt, doesn't mean any and every purchase is a good one. At the very least, spending a lot of money on a series of low quality items that you end up having to replace is a sustainability issue.

And that doesn't preclude you from getting a good deal either. That doesn't mean you should spend days shopping around for a few dollars off every purchase, but "voting with your wallet" is always worth doing.

No, I think the point is that you shouldn't make this distinction with respect to your budget. It's saying that if you take care of other wasteful spending, get your big wins, then plan for $500 of spending, then it doesn't matter if you make a dumb purchase. Don't feel guilty that you didn't get the best deal, don't feel guilty about the concept of a "good" or "bad" purchase, it just was within your budget, you wanted it and someone was selling it. You can't always do this comparison and avoiding dumb/wasteful decisions.

Yes, I am exaggerating a bit, but I think you missed the point.

I don't feel guilty at all. I feel fantastic not buying the sweatpants. I [quite specifically] don't want the joy from them. I just need clothing and I like to look sharp. A month ago I visited a second hand store. It was really well maintained, the experience was much like visiting a museum. They had a lot of second hand clothing all washed, ironed and nicely folded / on coat hangers and it was all nicely sorted by size.

I buy 8 pants for 3 euro each simply because they look fantastic on me. If it was a [new] clothing store I wouldn't buy 8 but I'd spend 100 euro on 5 of them and at most 50 for the other 3 if I ran into them there. I just didn't put myself in a [new] clothing store type of situation. I prefer to expose myself to (usually not very nice) second hand clothing at some interval. Sometimes they have something nice. Parts missing I buy new.

I see some wonderful old leather chairs too, the best one was sold regrettably. I also consider buying a really heavy suitcase massage table that I absolutely do not need but it looked really awesome, was in mint condition and was absurdly cheap. A fun day.

Clothing stores nowadays strike me as if everyone is going to a funeral. By comparison its a depressing experience but sometimes you have to. I wouldn't be able to sell those cloths at those prices, I'm paying for their ability to sell me things. (fool me)

If I have the time I do like to browse used merchandise, as well as find stuff on craigslist etc. that I know I can fix up or deal with rather than buy a new one.

Often it's cheaper given the bigger picture just to buy a new one, though. But, finding some old tech t-shirt in a thrift store is fun!

I definitely don't buy new vehicles.

You know, I had a technical job interview a few months ago where the interviewers told me I spent too much time on the little details and ignored the big picture. I didn't get what they meant until this comment, so thank you!

> It's easier to justify the cost of a 200+$ espresso maker if I'm really that big of a fan and already have a defined habbit.

That's exactly what I did: Started a small spreadsheet to work out how long it would take to pay off a $400 espresso maker. Turned out I would make my money back within a year.

Then there's the added bonus that I now own a decent espresso maker which has been great for making guests coffee/showing off. I also get to choose the beans and milk which means that if I wanted to, I could substantially lower the price of my self-made cup of coffee if I was ok with lower quality beans/milk (turns out that I am not ok with that, so no savings there :().

> It really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.

Have to add on that this is definitely not correct. Yes you must not simply inflate your spending to match your 100% of income if the latter increases, but while there's a limit to how much you can decrease outlays, income increase has no exact limit. Bob makes $60k, never buys coffee, brings lunch from home every day, stays focused on his personal finances, saves $5k/yr on lunch & coffee expenditures. Alice makes $60k, buys a $5 latte every single day, spends $12-15 per workday on lunch, focuses on job skills & networking, and negotiates a $10k raise upon switching jobs. Who comes out on top in this situation?

My point is not that budgeting or frugality isn't useful, but that focusing on changing outlays and considering income fixed or even irrelevant, as you suggest, is not a useful or accurate way to look at things.

I think you‘re making a good point.

I would add though, that 6510‘s statement...

> * it really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.*

didn’t remind me of extreme frugalism (in which case I would side with your argument) but with my encounters in the workplace: No matter how much most people increase their income, they also increase their spending. And some manage to par their spending increases with with their income increases.

Like many in tech, I‘ve made great income progress and during that I saw and continue to see colleagues struggling financially even though they‘re in the top income decile.

To me, suggesting that I save money by not buying coffee for fifty years is extreme frugalism.

12-15 is 1200-1500 cent. Lets say 1300.

10 cent coffee (12 euro/kg 30gr/liter) + 20-50 cent sandwich (5 cent slice or 15 cent bun, a 10 cent egg and/or 25 gr cheese 25 cent, 5 cent butter) is 30-60 cent. Lets say 40.

1300/40 = 32.5 while Alice only got a 17% raise. The extra 5k doesn't buy her anything. She will just favor the 15$ lunch which is 20% more expensive(!)

Coffee was just an example of course. Bob wont be able to save this much on everything while some things will be even cheaper. There are other perks like growing your own food and making your own stuff.

But the real kicker is perhaps that Alice could [naively] spend all of her savings on a big purchase, get fired and turn her life into hell on earth. If Bob does that he can be reasonably certain he will figure it out. His big purchase is also more likely something that can be converted back into cash.

Agreed, and that whole "oh just ignore purchases less than $10" is what causes people to go into debt without realizing it.

Buying $8 daily coffees, lottery tickets, in-app purchases for crates of Candy Crush tokens, and subscribing to all kinds of useless subscription-delivery services (razors, shirts, Japanese candy, etc) adds adds up even if you're on Silicon Valley salaries.

You are pretty much buying shots of endorphins. You get those anyway. You can get more of it for a short while but then sensitivity is dialed down and you have to buy candy crush crates forever. I really enjoy turning down the offers.

I think I phrased my comment poorly. I agree that a daily coffee is probably worth considering at ~$3x5x50 = $750 a year. (actually in my case I have multiple coffees throughout the day so if I were to purchase them it'd be more like $1500 or more). What I mean is the _occasional_ coffee is not worth bothering about.

I think any recurring payment is worth recording, but where you set the level is pretty personal

While I agree that recurring costs should be accounted for, I'm trying to get a bit of balance in my approach.

To put it in perspective, it's not out of the realm of possibility that I could switch jobs and make $11k extra this year. It's also not out of the realm of possibility that I have an injury that puts me out of work for the next 2 years. (Or, hypothetically, a global pandemic that reduces or increases my hours)

I deal with that level of uncertainty by only tracking the broad strokes.