MILLENNIALS, YOU’VE HEARD it: The simple reason you can’t put money down on a home is that you’re too busy sinking your paychecks into $13 avocado toast and $6 oat-milk lattes.

Except this argument has been going on for generations. It’s an old personal-finance cliché that if you want to save for anything, the first things you should cut out are coffee, restaurant meals, and subscriptions. In short: small joys.

This comes from the idea that money is basically math—if I make X, I will save Y, and then I will be all set.

So let’s do the math and unpack all this nonsense.

The 2022 National Coffee Association report revealed that 33 percent of coffee drinkers who bought the beverage in the past week did so at least four times.

Of those surveyed, 17 percent said that a latte was their drink of choice. A grande latte from my local Starbucks in southern California costs $4.95 (pretax). At four drinks per week, for 52 weeks per year, that’s $1,029.60 annually. If you threw that money into the market for the next 20 years, with a 7 percent return, you’d end up with more than $44,000.

Okay, so not an insignificant amount of money—but also (and sadly) not a difference maker when it comes to retirement or enough to make a dent in a mortgage on a nice three-bedroom.

But the bigger issue is that math never considers psychology. “Money is not just a logical or practical, systematic thing,” says Steven M. Hughes, a financial therapist and the founder of Know Money, a financial-literacy organization.“There are emotions and psychological experiences tied up in our money, which is why we don’t always use our money or manage it the way that people think we should.”

Hughes says that sometimes people judge the spending of others “because they have experienced some type of traumatic event around money or have seen someone experience a traumatic event around money.” Shaming your avocado toast is their attempt to “save” you from a similar trauma.

Nice thought, I guess, but cutting out all the stuff you love in order to scrimp for some unaffordable future home or retirement decades away might actually be more harmful than helpful.

Small, intentional purchases are good for you on multiple levels, says Amber Hawley, a licensed therapist and the host of the Easily Distracted Entrepreneur podcast. “When people go to coffee shops or go out to breakfast, lunch, or dinner, they’re usually being social and connecting with other people and breaking up their routine or spending quality time with someone,” she says.

Research may support this. A 2016 study in Psychological Science determined that personality-matched spending (spending to enhance your specific lifestyle) “could turn out to be as important to well-being as finding the right job, the right neighborhood, or even the right friends and partners.”

To dial it all back slightly, enhancing your lifestyle isn’t permission to justify that vacation you know you can’t afford. However, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice coffee to ensure a financially fit future.

That comes with spending responsibly, saving steadily, and investing over time. I know it sounds boring—but this is why life gives us avocado toast and oat-milk lattes.

Enjoy them, would you?

A version of this article originally appeared in the May/June 2023 issue of Men's Health.

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Chris Browning
Writer

Chris Browning, a former financial analyst, is the creator and host of the award-winning short-form podcast Popcorn Finance and the call-in money-advice show This Is Awkward.