“Stop buying coffee for $5.50. You got to work and spend $15 on a sandwich—what are you, an idiot?”
Apparently your coffee is keeping you broke.
Choose a financial goal. We’ll calculate exactly how many coffees you’d have to skip to reach it.
Median sale price of a new U.S. house in June 2026. U.S. Census Bureau ↗
The math behind the latte factor
The latte factor says your daily coffee is what stands between you and a down payment. It is a division problem, so we did the division. A $398,300 house at $5.50 a cup is 72,419 coffees — one a day, every day, for 198 years, 3 months. Stack the cups and they would reach 1.2× Mount Everest.
Investing the same money rather than stuffing it in a jar does change the answer: at a 7% annual return, $5.50 a day reaches the same goal in about 39 years. That is compounding doing the work, not the sacrifice — and it is still longer than most people are willing to wait for a house.
Which is the point. Small purchases are worth seeing; they are not where a goal this size is won. Enter your own goal above and the verdict changes with it — under six months, the coffee really is the lever. Over five years, it never was.
Latte factor questions.
The latte factor is the idea, popularized by David Bach, that small daily purchases are what keep people from building wealth — skip the $5.50 coffee, the argument goes, and the savings compound into something large. This calculator takes the claim literally and does the division for you.
Rarely, and the arithmetic is the reason. A $398,300 house divided by a $5.50 daily coffee is 72,419 cups — about 198 years, 3 months of skipping one every single day, landing you at the down payment in April 12, 2224. For a goal that size the daily coffee is not the variable that matters; housing costs, income, and interest rates are.
It helps enormously, and it still is not enough on its own. Putting the same $5.50 a day into a portfolio returning 7% a year reaches $398,300 in roughly 39 years instead of 198 — compounding does most of the work, not the abstinence. The calculator shows both dates side by side.
That you buy one coffee a day at the price you enter ($5.50 by default), that you save every skipped purchase without spending it elsewhere, and that the goal price stays fixed. The invested figure assumes a 7% nominal annual return, compounded daily, with no taxes or fees. All of these are generous to the latte-factor argument — the real numbers are usually worse.
No — small purchases are worth seeing, they are just not where a large goal is won or lost. The useful version of this habit is knowing what your recurring costs actually add up to, then pointing that attention at the few categories big enough to move the total: housing, transport, debt, and what you earn.