Cost of a Habit Calculator

It's the idea, popularized by author David Bach, that small daily expenses like a coffee add up to serious money over time — and even more if invested instead. A $6 coffee five days a week is about $1,560 a year; invested at 7% for 30 years, that stream could grow to well over $140,000.

Not necessarily — the point isn't to eliminate every joy, it's awareness. Cutting a habit you don't value frees money for goals you do. But your biggest wins usually come from large recurring costs (housing, cars, insurance), so tackle those too rather than only sweating the small stuff.

It treats the money you'd otherwise spend as a monthly investment, compounded at the return you enter. So it's not just the sum of what you'd save — it's that saving plus decades of growth. That compounding is why the final number dwarfs the raw spending total.

No — it uses a fixed nominal return, so the future figure is in future dollars. To think in today's purchasing power, use a real (after-inflation) return, roughly your expected return minus about 3%. Either way, the comparison between spending and investing the same money holds.