yes, people will always spend money on little things that will add up, but that’s just it. this blog is trying to show that you can save a lot and put your money to better use. the economy is only getting worse and worse. might as well be less moronic and hold on to whatever money you can save for now.

And the get-rich-by-forgoing-coffee “horrification” argument is the oldest and one of the weakest arguments in the Personal Finance 101 handbook. It presumes that life consists of denials and that your daily cup of joe has less inherent value on the rest of the garbage people buy and consume on a daily basis.

It also suffers from a major gap between a theoretical problem and a realistic one. This idea is built upon the notion that small expenses on a regular basis accumulate to huge numbers. But human behavior is never quite as you plan it on paper.

Take diet soft drinks, for example. You take the average American’s consumption of soda, replace the sugar with some sugar-free sweetener, and effectively Americans should be losing 19 pounds of excess flab, year-over-year, until mathematically we all should have disappeared into the ether. The reality has been quite different: the advent and ubiquity of diet soft drinks has coincided with an epidemic explosion of obesity — when by rights we should have all been losing 19-lbs a year on our diet soft drinks.