The latte-metric

[haha]

This is from MF-

Yes, as everyone likes to point out, forgoing your daily cup of coffee at Fourbucks will help you save toward a comfortable retirement.
But, too often, the years of monk-like austerity are eliminated with a single bad decision. I'll show you using the latte metric -- that is, how many days of avoiding those $4 pick-me-ups it takes to equal one bowl of bad decision-making.

Don't Blow Your Retirement With One Mistake


Ha

[CitricAcid]

Very similar to the pound-wise, penny-foolish cliche. With larger purchases such as a house, it is easy for some to throw away $10,000 or so that is seen as nothing simply because you are gaining a net of $200,000 or whatever it is on a sale. That's a lot of lattes.

[dex]

Writers are desperate to come up with ideas for articles so they torture one piece of advise to make a point.

The coffee savings = comfortable retirement is a canard to make the points in the article. Without it, the authors would be repeating the same advise - research house values when you buy, learn to negotiate and research stocks/indexes.


The takeaway from the article is wrong.
"The important takeaway is how much everyday scrimping and saving you have to do to make up for an investing mistake. "

The real takeaway is that none of us can always make the best financial decisions. Making a lot of small wise financial decisions (e.g. coffee spending; cars; and other things people on this board mention) can help to off set some larger financial mistakes.

Also, the point about the coffee is to be aware on how relatively small spending decisions can add up over time, learn to track your spending so you can make informed decisions, understand compound interest, etc.