I Stopped Buying Coffee for 90 Days — Here's What Actually Happened

On January 4th, 2024, I decided to test one of the oldest pieces of personal finance advice in the country: stop buying coffee.

The advice is everywhere. David Bach made it famous with "The Latte Factor" in the early 2000s. Suze Orman has shouted it on television. The math is always the same: $5 a day on coffee is $1,825 a year, which invested at 7% for thirty years becomes about $190,000.

The math is correct. The math is also, I came to think, not really the point. So I did the experiment for ninety days and tracked the actual outcome. Here is what happened.

Day One Through Twelve: Genuine Misery

I'm not going to pretend the first twelve days were anything other than hard. I had been buying coffee from a small place across from my school every weekday morning for about three years. The barista knew my order. I'd grab the cup, walk the four blocks to my classroom, and that walk with the coffee was, in some real way, the only fifteen minutes of my day that belonged entirely to me before twenty-four second graders required my attention.

When I stopped buying it, I lost more than the coffee. I lost the ritual. I lost the fifteen minutes. I also lost the very specific morning energy that a $5 latte produces and a home-brewed mug of supermarket-blend does not.

For the first two weeks, I genuinely considered quitting the experiment. I made worse coffee at home, drank it out of a thermos at my desk, and was perceptibly more tired and less patient at work.

Day Thirteen Through Forty-Five: A Real Change

Around the two-week mark, two things happened.

First, I bought a slightly better French press and slightly better coffee beans from a local roaster. The total cost was about $42 for the press and $16/month for a bag of beans that lasted me three weeks. The home coffee got noticeably better. Not great. Better.

Second, I stopped expecting the morning to be exciting. I had not realized how much the daily coffee purchase had been doing emotionally. It had been my small daily reward, the thing that made an early Tuesday feel slightly indulgent. Without it, the morning became more like... morning. Functional. Slightly dull.

By day thirty I had stopped craving the coffee shop. By day forty-five I had genuinely forgotten about it most days.

Day Forty-Six Through Ninety: The Money

This is the part the articles get right and also miss.

The articles are correct that I saved money. Over the ninety days, I spent $94 total on coffee (the French press, beans, plus three coffees I bought when traveling). My previous spending over the equivalent ninety days was approximately $450. Net saving: $356.

The articles imply this $356 saving will compound to $190,000 over thirty years. The articles are correct, mathematically, in a vacuum. The articles are also misleading.

Here is what actually happened with the $356.

I did not invest it. I would like to tell you I did. I would like to be the kind of person who saved $4 a day and methodically moved each $4 into a Roth IRA at the end of each week. I was not that person. The money simply stayed in my checking account, where it slowly drifted into other things — slightly more expensive groceries, a $25 dinner with a friend, a Costco run that included some fancy cheese.

This is, I now think, the dirty secret of "small habit" personal finance advice. The cost of the coffee is visible. The redirection of the money you didn't spend on the coffee is invisible. Unless you have a deliberate, automatic mechanism to capture the saving, the saving leaks into the rest of your spending and produces nothing.

What the Coffee Advice Actually Tests

After ninety days of this, I came to a slightly different conclusion than the personal finance industry has reached.

The point of stopping coffee is not the coffee. The point is whether you can introduce a small daily discipline into your spending without it collapsing. If you can stop the coffee and capture the saving, you can probably stop other things too, and the cumulative effect is meaningful.

If you stop the coffee and the money leaks elsewhere, the exercise has failed — but not for the reason the articles think. It has failed because you have not built a system to direct the saving. You've just moved the spending.

What I Did Differently in Month Four

After the ninety days ended, I did not go back to the coffee shop. I did, however, go back to having an occasional Friday-morning treat — usually once a week, sometimes twice. That has been my pattern for about a year now. Probably ten coffees a month instead of twenty.

More importantly, I did something I had not done in the ninety-day experiment. I set up an automatic weekly transfer of $25 from my checking account to my Roth IRA, the day after payday. The transfer happens whether or not I bought coffee. The money is gone before I can decide what to do with it.

In the year since I set that up, I have moved an extra $1,300 into the Roth IRA. That money is invested. That money will compound. The coffee was incidental — the discipline of capturing the saving was the thing that mattered.

What This Experiment Taught Me

The "stop buying coffee" advice is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The full advice should be:

Step one: Identify a small recurring purchase you are making partly out of habit.

Step two: Stop making it for thirty days, to confirm it was habit rather than something you genuinely valued.

Step three: If you genuinely don't miss it, set up an automatic transfer for the amount you were spending on it, going straight to a separate savings or investment account.

Step four: Allow yourself to bring the purchase back, occasionally, if you find you do miss some of it. Once a week instead of every day is a 75% reduction without the misery of a 100% reduction.

Most of the personal finance advice on this stops at step two. The result is people who give up coffee for a month, feel miserable, go back to coffee, and conclude that "small habits don't matter."

Small habits matter enormously, but only when they're connected to a saving mechanism. Otherwise, you're just moving money around inside your own checking account.

The $190,000 Question

The math says that giving up a $5 daily coffee for thirty years and investing the savings produces about $190,000.

The math is correct. The math is also, for almost everyone, fictional, because almost nobody does the second part of that sentence. The saving has to go somewhere or it stops being a saving.

If you want the $190,000, the coffee is the easy part. The hard part is the automatic transfer that makes the saving compound. Set up the transfer first. Then think about the coffee.

The order matters.