The Small Things Add Up

If you're like me, you've probably spent a lot of time the past year staring at your bank account balance, thinking up creative, grand (and ultimately ill-advised) experiments that would, just maybe, save you from forthcoming financial doom -- like selling your home, buying land in Montana, and living off of it. (Farming's easy, right?) Of course, in this scenario, you'd also (like me) be being a little over dramatic, because a smart financial plan doesn't have to be that extreme.

Truth be told, a lot of savings can be found around the margins. The $3 coffee in the morning, the $7 lunch or the $12 pitcher at your local watering hole, they all add up -- and more than you'd initially think. The trick is to multiply it out over the course of a year. Instead of justifying your morning Starbucks every day -- "what's $3 when what you really need is an extra couple hundred?" you might ask -- calculate that expense out over an entire year. For example, if you're drinking that $3 cup of joe every work day, all year long, you're looking at an annual coffee expense of $780 ($3 times 5 days a week times 52 weeks in a year). Which is quite a bit, especially as it costs (roughly) 10 times less to brew coffee at home, and even less if at work.

Same idea works with eating out every day for lunch, weekly movie theater tickets, cable TV, and on and on. Point being, costs can be hidden, especially for the smaller items in our lives. But just because they are hidden, doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't costly in the long run.

For further money saving tips, check out our sister blog here.