The Starbucks Trap: How Coffee Could Be Sabotaging Your Finances

“Surprise, Surprise, Surprise”, to quote Gomer Pyle. Yes you heard me right we are going to talk coffee, java, Cup Of Joe, or whatever else you call that extremely gross stuff most humans drink every morning to wake up. It has gotten to the point where many of my friends and co-workers cannot even function until they have started on their 2^nd or 3^rd glass of coffee in the morning. They continue to pour the stuff down their gullet all day and into the evening, then they wonder why they can never get a good night sleep.

Many of my friends have a daily ritual of hitting one of the ever popular premium coffee joints such as Starbucks, or Mr. Bean and spending $5+ dollars on a fancy coffee drink I cannot even pronounce the name of, let alone figure out what they just ordered. Then the sales person askes what size would you like your drink, and again I have no clue what they just said.

And most people don’t stop with just the crazy named coffee drink, they have to get the little lemon pound cake for another $3+ dollars. So now your single trip to the coffee house is giving you a one way ticket to the poor house. And just imagine if a person was to make this trip two, three or even more times per day. At an average of $8 a trip times two trips per day and you are at $16 per day. Or if you look at the bigger picture that if you made two stops per day, your grand total would be $5,840 per year. I think you can see where I’m going with this blog at this point.

So now that you are most likely laughing at my lack of knowledge of the Starbucks culture, I will tell you that I don’t drink coffee. So I figured I didn’t needed to learn the language of ordering coffee. But what I did figure out one day in August of 2007, was the language of how much those fancy coffees drinks are costing the Joneses of the world.

How much did you say that coffee cost?

So in August of 2007 I met a person who shall remain anonymous, so let’s call her Natasha. As I got to know Natasha I soon realized that she like many of my friends had an infinity for the Starbucks culture. As Natasha and I became closer we co-mingled money as many couples do, when they start to cohabitate. Since I have been using Quicken to track my finances since the early 90s, it was only natural to add her financial data in my quicken file.

As Natasha and I became closer and began sharing our lives together, I was able to train myself to get past the smell of burnt coffee. We would share time together hanging at Starbucks. And every time the price would pop up on the cash register my heart would drop at the sight of the price tag. So one day I decided I would make a special category in my Quicken account called Starbucks.

Yep you guessed it I started tracking Natasha’s habit in Quicken, unbeknownst to her. So over the course of a couple of months I tracked her spending habits that related to coffee. Some days she would only go once, some days more than once. Some days she would get food with her order and some days she would not.

Here is what it looks like when you wake up and smell the java.