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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

This was my favorite paragraph:

> Personal finance experts love to discuss how much money you can save by avoiding that daily Starbucks habit or packing a brown bag lunch every day at the office. While I guess you could add to your bottom line somewhat by cutting back on the little things (a) this stuff doesn’t move the needle all that much, (b) it’s the little things in life that can give you small joys on a daily basis and (c) the large purchases will have a much greater impact on your bottom line.

This is also a big difference I've noticed between a "rich dad, poor dad" mindset. Sweating the small stuff doesn't make much of the difference in the end, it's the much less frequent but more impactful decisions (where you live, who you marry, the car you buy) that determines your overall financial well-being.

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Not defending the alternate mindset per se (my wife and I have a 2006 car, and a 2011 we bought used), but I can understand how it arises from the fixed costs of changing those things.

Some people are truly reckless, but others end up in a situation where they don't forecast perfectly (pay cuts, unanticipated expenses). Downsizing your house is a huge change and a car loan lasts five years. If you're putting 15% towards savings/debt and want to bump that up (or worse: draining your savings by a little bit each month), you can cut back on short-term expenses immediately.

That’s why my wife and I have adopted a strategy of living on only one of our incomes, and saving and investing the other.

I realize we are in a position to do so in that we are both career focused and make enough together that we can afford to do so. If we were working minimum wage jobs, this wouldn’t work.

But I imagine that’s the case for a lot of folks on this forum. Certainly many are single, but for those that aren’t, it’s lkkely true.

What this has enabled us to do is both work for a series of startups. Also, we aren’t interested in kids, but it leaves us with the option if things change. Or, god forbid, one of us were to get sick or be injured.

Living to the hilt as a DINK sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

you can cut back on short-term expenses immediately.

Can definitely agree with that. There's hundreds or even a thousand or two on the table with phone bills, insurance of all kinds, etc and even those are trivial to change up compared to a house or car sale.

> packing a brown bag lunch

What's the significance of a lunch bag being brown in the US?

turn of phrase, just means making your own lunch.

edit: im wrong, it's an idiom.

There's no significance really. It's just a stereotypical lunch bag. I think most people use coolers these days, but back in the day you'd pack your sandwhich, chips, and drink in a brown paper bag to take to work.

Something like this.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41wfQvGOWFL...

Except a Thermos bottle instead of a plastic water bottle.

It's the cheapest disposable lunch carry you can purchase in the US that is tightly coupled to our cultural concept of frugal food expenses.

It's cheaper to make brown paper than white paper. Paper bags aren't bleached white because there's no functional need to do so.

It's an idiom for a cheap lunch made at home. At US stores all the very cheap lunch-sized disposable bags are brown for the most part.

Brown bags are the classic container used to pack a lunch for a child attending school in the US. That practice dates back many generations, although I'm sure it's becoming rare in the last few decades.

Bag lunches can also be purchased at grocery stores and restaurants. So the brown implies that the lunch was purchased at home.

In 2018 a bag lunch from a grocery or restaurant is more likely to be brown than the one packed at home but the usage remains.

It's just a generic term for a (usually low-cost) packed lunch from home, as opposed to going out and eating for lunch. It comes from how cheap lunches were packed in a brown paper back in the old days.

in the context of a lunch container it conveys "nothing special", inexpensive, utilitarian, practical as opposed to fancy , expensive, extravagant "three martini" lunch

Except they're wrong. Over the life of a car, a $5/day starbucks habit can cost more than the difference between buying a new vs used car. If you keep your car for 10 years, $5/day is $18k. Our current cars are 13 years, and 17 years old.

Why aren't they BOTH wrong?

Save $5/day AND $18/k over ten years? Compound daily the both of em...

Or don't... each direction has pro's and con's.

> Over the life of a car, a $5/day starbucks habit can cost more than the difference between buying a new vs used car.

Does this statement not express the concept?

One decision (buying new vs used) can completely wipe out any benefit you got from buying Starbucks every day, for 10 years. That's a very long time.

Buying a new SUV every 3 years and paying taxes on every transaction quickly get's to vastly more than 18k/decade. Remember, you can change both car type and new vs used.

New mid range SUV's can easily end up costing more than 100,000$ over a decade. Even cars can get insane. I just watched a view on a guy who spent 28,000$ owning an Aston Martin for 10 MONTHS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrrFAjxKtj0

+this. High savings is made from a collection of good habits (or avoided pitfalls), not just one. It's easy to spend 36k over 10 years on lunch+coffee ($10/day). It's easy to spend 36k on a car that you will use for 10 years. Same ballpark, same opportunity for optimization.

> High savings is made from a collection of good habits (or avoided pitfalls), not just one.

Correct. The whole point of the "stop buying lunch out every day" is not to never do it, but to develop good financial habits and to show you that small changes, taken over a long period, pay off.

I bring my lunch almost every day. I actually do it because it is one less thing I have to think about during the day (having to decide where to go and then either walk or drive there). But the numbers pay off too. Assuming $10 a day for lunch, that's $50 a week or $2,600 a year. The cost of bread, lunch meat, condiments, etc is about $10 a week for me or $520 a year. You save more than $2k a year by not eating out every day.

For most people, that is not an insignificant amount of money. That's enough for a nice little vacation. Now, you actual amount will be less, because everyone splurges occasionally. But little vampire costs like daily lunches or coffees do add up and if you look around your life there are probably a lot more of them than you realize.

Should people not buy stupidly expensive cars they likely cannot afford? Yup. But that doesn't negate the broader point that people should look at the larger financial picture.

This article [1] was the top google result when I searched "average car ownership length". It reports 79.3 months is the average length that Americans own a vehicle, so a little more than 6 and 1/2 years. Paying more for a vehicle makes sense if you own it longer (or otherwise get more value out of it).

I think the problem is that people both buy $5 coffee/day AND buy large, expensive to own and maintain vehicles AND replace those vehicles too often.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/28/car-owners-are-holding-their...

That is of course assuming that you will really buy Starbucks coffee every day and will not stop for 10 years. Which is kind of made up situation.

But who is spending $5/day everyday at Starbucks?

$5 * 365days * 10yrs = $18,250 Full time work is approximately 71% of the year, 260 days.

$5 * 260 * 10yrs = $13,000

Still a lot of money. A regular coffee at Starbucks is less than half that - $2.15

A more reasonable number would be $5000-6000 over 10 years if we're going to say "a coffee a day at Starbucks" is the difference between new and used.

My daughter works at Starbucks. The answer is: many people, many more than you think until you're there every day seeing them. And it's $4-7 coffee-based drinks.

> A regular coffee at Starbucks is less than half that - $2.15

What percentage of people order a regular coffee at Starbucks? Not many, I'm sure.

If you order the regular coffee you get it right away, pretty much while you are paying. The fact that most of the people you see waiting are the ones who ordered the fancier drinks is because of selection bias.

Pro tip: their dark/specialty roasts for which they have a sign up (and often have ready to go mornings) can be had as a pourover for no extra charge. (Don't let them upsell you to the Clover). I don't like their basic Pike's roast.

There is an elementary school down the street from the local Starbucks. After school, kids by the dozens routinely buy $4-7 drinks, especially iced.

Another way to put that would be to say that if you buy used instead of new, you can treat yourself to a $5 coffee every goddamn day (who does that!? even on weekends?!).

There's nothing wrong with having good personal discipline, but the notion that you can scrimp your way to wealth by eschewing $5 daily coffees is absurd.

Not to mention, that's $5 daily coffees and...nothing else, as there's usually not a second thing you can cut back on in these preposterous examples, and once you've cut back the coffee once, that's it.

One final thought: often the people who say this have zero experience with actually living close to the poverty line. A cheap, unhealthy, delicious indulgence on the daily can make living with less feel much more palatable - or at least, suck less hard. It's not "disciplined" but it'd be a hell of a lot easier for me to be disciplined with my fancy life full of excess.

> you can treat yourself to a $5 coffee every goddamn day (who does that!? even on weekends?!).

It's not a $5 daily coffee, it's 2 or 3 $2 coffees. 2 reasonably priced coffees isn't so insane if your workplace doesn't have a machine and won't let you donate one.

> One final thought: often the people who say this have zero experience with actually living close to the poverty line. A cheap, unhealthy, delicious indulgence on the daily can make living with less feel much more palatable - or at least, suck less hard.

THIS. I spent five years in poverty. Sometimes actually, sometimes just above the line. Always worried about making rent.

Eschewing a twice-weekly visit to the coffee shop is a LOT easier, psychologically, when it's not "my only reprieve from eating shitty food in a shitty apartment and still worrying about how we'll pay the grocery bills and rent".

And I had the benefiting of knowing that the situation was temporary and it could all be over the moment I decided I had had enough. And a great parental safety net that saved me from the credit card debt treadmill more than once. I can't imagine how bleak things are existing like that with no safety and knowing you don't have an out.

My daughter works at Starbucks. There is a shocking (to me) contingent of people who do indeed order $4-7 coffee-based drinks daily. She sees the same people every day. It's mind-bending to me, but clearly normal for many.

I am guilty of this, except with Dunkin. Over the last few years, I have purchased at least five coffee machines trying to make coffee that is as good but I haven't been able to. I am a coffee addict; if I don't have coffee in the morning, I get a headache.

I'm one of those people (though, not starbucks). It's a drink I can't get without relatively expensive equipment and effort at home. It's a chance to catch up with news without the expectation of being on call for work or feeling like I should be doing something productive around the house. It's a moment of calm before going in to chaos, err, work.

It's also a chance to socialize, with no expectations, with other regulars.

It's a treat.

I visit Bluebottle and probably spend $6 almost every day I work. Does it add up? Not really. Assuming I visit 220 times a year it's almost 1.5 years before I've spent as much as I do on 1 months rent.

If you're making $100/ week, $30 on coffee is a lot of money. If you're making $2k/ week, it's not moving the needle in a meaningful way.

My original comment sounded judgmental, and I don't mean to be. I'm just surprised, but everybody gets to choose their own priorities and interests. I can't imagine spending that much on a coffee drink daily, or spending $1500/year on coffee. I also can't relate to people who spend a lot of money on cars, especially high-maintenance cars, or any number of other expenses.

But me, I might spend close to that amount on graphic novels, or on graphic novels and paperback books combined. I make larger purchases less often, and many people might consider my expenditures wasteful as well.

I suspect many people spending $6/day on coffee have never counted the cost, and might be surprised to realize that they're spending $120/month on coffee. But you've done the math and find it worthwhile, so good for you!

When my GF was out of work after 2008 I would give her a couple of dollars to go hang out at the coffee shop every morning with her friends. Because she needed that to a) stay sane. b) pick up occasional side jobs.

Operationally there is zero difference between a new and used car. One thing about cars, price is about a quarter to a third the cost of running one. A used F150 or baby BMW will cost you more than a new Toyota Yaris over five years.

Yeah, but then you're driving an old car. Some people (myself included) would rather not do that.

Isn't it just like doing optimization without profiling?

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