Lazy Man and Money

  • Blog
  • Home
  • About
    • What I’m Doing Now
  • Consumer Protection
    • Is Le-vel Thrive a Scam?
    • Is Jusuru a Scam?
    • Is Beachbody’s Shakeology a Scam?
    • Is “It Works” a Scam?
    • Is Neora (Nerium) a Scam?
    • Youngevity Scam?
    • Are DoTERRA Essential Oils a Scam?
    • Is Plexus a Scam?
    • Is Jeunesse a Scam?
    • Is Kangen Water a Scam?
    • ViSalus Scam Exposed!
    • Is AdvoCare a Scam?
  • Contact
  • Archive

How Much is Your Caffeine Costing You?

August 19, 2020 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

According to the FDA (PDF), “During this time, the average amount of caffeine consumed has remained constant at approximately 300 milligrams (mg) per person per day.” Thus the average person has 109,500mg of caffeine a year.

How much does that cost?

Glad you asked. I’ve got your answer.

Before we get to that though, I’d like to remind no one of the not-so-famous scene in perhaps the best movie that no one saw: Mr. Destiny. The main character Larry Burroughs is having a very bad day, but he decides he needs his coffee. With no way to properly make it, he eats the teaspoon of grounds saying, “Gotta have my coffee.”

This is where some (most?) of us are with caffeine. My theory for this post is that while there are a variety of reasons that go into your choice of caffeine, you might find that you are more like Larry than you think. In any case, the idea is to wake you up (pun very much intended) to the costs of caffeine.

Caffeine Pricing

I’ve also included this data in an HTML table at the bottom of this article. It runs a little wide, so I have to put there where it won’t run into the sidebar.)

Let me walk you through the math of the first row to get an idea of how this chart works. The first example is the one we are familiar with: Coffee.

Coffee’s caffeine ranges all over the spectrum, but the best data I found had it being around 95mg per 8 ounces. As we covered recently (Brewing Coffee at Home vs. Buying at a Coffee Shop), the cost is around $0.30 cents a cup. For someone to get the annual 109,500mg of caffeine from $0.30 cups of coffee, they’d have to spend $345.79 a year.

I always suggest doing a sanity check on this math. Three cups of coffee is a little less than the 300mg average. That’s a little less a dollar a day. The $345.79 annual cost is a little less than a dollar a day per year.

The next three columns are very similar to what we covered yesterday in How Much is Your Coffee Costing You? (Maybe 1/3 of Million Dollars!). I’ve made the assumption that I’m going to live to 85 (based on a life expectancy calculator) which gives me 47 years of annual cost. Your age and life expectancy will vary (hopefully this is obvious). Using Financial Mentor’s Latte Factor Calculator, I plugged in all the numbers, just as I did yesterday.

However, I made one change. Yesterday, I put the expected return on investment at 8% as recommended in the chart. While one may be able to invest and get this consistently, it doesn’t cover inflation. Thus you are left looking at number that is huge, and a lot of that is due to projecting inflation for 47 years down the line. Some of the numbers in this chart were multiple millions of dollars and that just seemed a little too sensationalistic for my taste. Today, I made the expected return on investment of 4%. This lower percentage is intended to cover inflation, investment expenses, gains taxes, etc.

The end result is that you’ll get numbers that make sense today.

Using that change and applying it to coffee we find that the lost interest in buying coffee for your caffeine supply is $31,579.63 or $47,831.73 in Real Cost (lost money on the coffee and lost investment opportunity).

I like to look at it this way: If I offered you $47,831.73 would you give up coffee for your life. It is a year’s salary for some people. I’m not saying that it is an easy choice, but it is food for thought.

Now you know how the chart works, the data speaks for itself. Here’s what I found interesting:

Soda

Like coffee, there’s a range of different costs for soda. There are generic store brands and name brands. There’s the cost of buying soda at the store and in a movie theater. You can save some money by buying 2-liters vs. cans. I went with the pricing of a 12-pack of soda, which I’ve often seen at $3. The best deal I’ve gotten is $2, but the Wal-Mart around me charges $2.68 for their Sam’s Choice. If it is $3.00 for 12-pack, that’s an even $0.25 for a 12-ounce can. I spot checked the caffeine content of a number of sodas and came to an average of 40mg of caffeine. That ranges quite a bit as well.

Even though the cost of soda is lower than coffee, the caffeine content is less. It’s nearly 8 cans of soda to get to the average 300mg of caffeine a day. The annual cost comes out to $684 with a real lifetime cost of more than $94,000.

Coffee Shops

I’m going to jump down to coffee shops. Once again, the amount of caffeine varies. I’m going to blame Starbucks’ Venti’s 415mg of caffeine for raising that 300mg average of Americans. And though it had the lowest lifetime real cost of all the options, paying more for more caffeine that you need is not a financial win. It’s like buying 30 gallons of gas for your Smart car, it’s just wasteful.

On average, the real lifetime cost of coffee is $123,515.34 or almost $80K more than brewing it at home. If you are making $40K a year, is it worth 2 more years of working to you?

Energy Drinks

The big stand-out in this category was Red Bull. It isn’t a lot of caffeine at all for its cost. I should note that I used Amazon for the costs of Monster and Red Bull. I used my local Aldi and Dollar Tree for the costs of Gridlock and Rip-It. The idea was to show a wide range from a variety of sources. This is why I wrote an article about saving money on energy drinks.

MLM Energy Drinks

It wouldn’t be a fun Lazy Man article without a little controversy (and even a little MLM bashing). MLM Energy drinks reflect company-stated retail prices. Often distributors can sign up for a wholesale discount that can earn 25% off. However, as you can see 25% off of a real cost of $471,757.08 isn’t much of a deal. It’s the old trick, raise the price and offer the consumer a discount to make them think that they are getting a deal.

When you see the real lifetime cost of $646,890.98 for Vemma Verve… it should shock you. There’s so little caffeine at such a huge cost that it can be worth 10-15 years of salary to get an average amount of caffeine. The same holds true for MonaVie eMV. These three things have one thing in common, they are marketing to college students and recently graduated adults who don’t know to avoid MLMs, and may be more likely to ignore a buck or two on many small purchases as part of the cost of being in a “business.”

Caffeine Pills

Let’s get back to the generic area. Of all the common list items here, the cheapest is the caffeine pill. I found 100 of these Natrol Caffeine 200mg Pills for $6 or 6 cents a pill. That’s just 3 cents for 100mg or 1/10 the price of coffee that you brew at home. It’s 1.5 cents for 50mg or around 1/16th the cost of a can of soda. Cutting the annual cost of to around $32 by taking caffeine pills has a profound effect on the lifetime real cost. It becomes only $4536.

Did I mention that it is a subscribe and save item from Amazon? You can save 15%-20% off the $6 price.

On the downside there’s the obligatory Jessie Spano warning:

(I had to include one pop-culture reference that people will know to make for Mr. Destiny above.)

Caffeine Powder

Honestly, I almost purposely left this option out the article. Why? It really isn’t a viable option in my view. You could kill yourself. Let me rephrase that a bit for emphasis: You will kill yourself. And people are asking to have caffeine powder banned.

Was I clear there? Good.

(I see you already thinking about ignoring my warnings. If so, please pick up a milligram scale.)

If it is so dangerous, why did I even include caffeine powder? I wanted to show that the cost of caffeine is trivial for a company to add caffeine to their products. I also wanted to show what the true cost of caffeine really is outside of the convenience of grabbing a drink.

I covered two different prices I found for bulk caffeine powder online. (No, I won’t well you where.) For a 100g bulk bag, the annual cost was $13.10, almost a third of what it cost for the pills above. However, if you really want to buy in bulk, you get the price as low as 2 tenths of a penny for 100mg. That’s a year’s worth of caffeine for $1.79. The only problem, besides the minor detail of killing yourself, is that you’ll need to split the cost of the huge bag with 405 of your closest friends… or pass it down 10-15 generations.

Final thoughts

I feel like I need to re-emphasize that the beverage choice here isn’t always about the caffeine. It can be about the taste, the atmosphere, the health, the convenience, other factors, or a combination of all of them. Nonetheless, it is good to know the financial implications of making your decision.

Finally, I want to thank Caffeine Informer for having an awesome website with all this information. It was extremely helpful to have all the data in one place.

 BrandServing SizeCostCaffeine (mg)Annual CostLifetime CostLost Interest*Real Cost*
Generic
Coffee (Generic)8 oz.$0.3095$345.79 $16,252.11 $31,579.63 $47,831.73
Soda (Average)12 oz.$0.2540$684.38 $32,165.63 $62,501.35 $94,666.97
Natrol Pills (Amazon)1 Pill$0.06200$32.80 $1,541.38 $2,995.06 $4,536.44
Caffeine Powder (100g bulk)100mg$0.01100$13.10$615.52 $1,196.03 $1,811.55
Caffeine Powder (25kg bulk)100mg$0.002100$1.79$83.98$163.19$247.17
Coffee Shops
Starbucks (Tall)12 oz.$1.75260$737.02 $34,639.90 $67,309.14 $101,949.05
Starbucks (Venti)20 oz.$2.25415$593.67 $27,902.71 $54,218.04 $82,120.75
Dunkin Donuts (Medium)14.oz$1.79178 $1,101.15 $51,754.13 $100,563.97 $152,318.10
Dunkin Donuts (Large)20 oz.$1.99244$893.05 $41,973.50 $81,559.14 $123,532.64
McDonalds (Small)12 oz.$1.00109 $1,004.59 $47,215.60 $91,745.10 $138,960.69
McDonalds (Large)20 oz.$1.69180 $1,028.08 $48,319.92 $93,890.91 $142,210.83
Coffee Shop Avg16 oz.$1.75231$892.93 $41,967.63 $81,547.72 $123,515.34
Energy Drinks
Gridlock (Aldi)16 oz.$1.00162$675.93 $31,768.52 $61,729.73 $93,498.24
Rip-It16 oz.$1.00200$547.50 $25,732.50 $50,001.08 $75,733.58
Monster16 oz.$1.46160$999.47 $46,975.21 $91,278.01 $138,253.22
Red Bull8.4 oz.$1.5180 $2,070.80 $97,327.82 $189,118.66 $286,446.48
Energy Drink Avg $1,073.43 $50,451.01 $98,031.87 $148,482.88
MLM Energy Drink
Vemma Verve1 can$3.4280 $4,676.56 $219,798.44 $427,092.54 $646,890.98
MonaVie eMV1 can$2.4680 $3,364.84 $158,147.66 $307,298.29 $465,445.95
LifeVantage Axio1 packet$2.00100 $2,190.00 $102,930.00 $200,004.31 $302,934.31
MLM Energy Avg $3,410.47 $160,292.03 $311,465.05 $471,757.08

Filed Under: MLM, Spending Tagged With: caffeine, coffee, energy drinks, starbucks

How $100 Could Save Your Child’s Life

November 10, 2008 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

Regular readers know that I have an affinity for professional football. Sometimes I take it much too seriously. I’m not proud of it, but that’s why they call us fanatics, right? Every Monday, one of my favorite writers, Peter King, comes out with an article about all the happenings around the NFL. On a day, known for being the bane of many people’s existence, Monday morning is a surprising bright spot in my week. What makes Peter King a great writer, in my opinion, is that he draws you into his life. He’s not afraid to talk about his daughters, his experience at the latest Starbucks, or a particularly annoying plane ride. I love that even though I don’t have kids, drink coffee, or fly often, I still feel like I can identify with him – and that’s why my writing tends to have some of the same influence (so some people tell me, though I think they are being much too kind.)

It’s pretty rare that I can share any of his writing with my readers, because football and personal finance – not exactly something that fits together. Last week, was one of those rare occassions. This year he’s added a new wrinkle to his column, each week he picks out a NFL player or personal who gives back unselfishly. One week he pointed out that Jason McKie contributions to the military (giving tickets and even meeting the family before the game). Another time, he wrote about how the Kurt Warner family – at a restaurant – will pick out an family and picks up the tab for them anonymously. He does this to show his children the joy of giving – knowing that he is blessed.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I think I’ve found my second favorite Kelly in Peter King’s column last week (you’ll need to scroll to the Good Guy of the Week section). Jim Kelly, the guy who may be best known for losing 4 Super Bowls, may just be one of the people who saves your child’s life someday.

He lost his son, Hunter, from a rare brain disease called Krabbe Leukodystrophy in 2005. It turns out that this can be diagnosed at birth. According to the article there are 53 other fatal diseases that can be diagnosed today – and Minnesota is the only state that tests for them all. Kelly lobby’s the states to try to get them to test for all of them. While we can buy a kit that will do it for $100 (some of the best money I think I could ever spend), he wants everyone to get them for free. He makes a good business case as well since treatment of many of these diseases, though rare, is can be hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars… per year. He’s already saved the life of one child and correctly points out that it’s worth more than Super Bowls.

The only problem I had with the article is that the editors didn’t link to Jim Kelly’s organization, Hunter’s Hope. (I’m giving King a free pass on this one.) When you have a popular website, you should understand the tremendous value a link has vs. just stating the website’s URL in the text. Readers don’t want to read a URL and have to cut and paste it into the URL bar – so are doing them a disservice. It’s why linking was invented in the first place – and one of the reasons why the web is such a powerful medium. I can see if you might not want to link to a competitor, but a charity that helps children? Poorly done, CNN. I hope you see this and go back and edit your story to give them the link that they deserve.

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: jason mckie, jim kelly, kurt warner, leukodystrophy, monday morning, nfl player, professional football, rare brain disease, starbucks, super bowls

Weekend Links: Game Seven Edition

August 1, 2011 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

It’s game seven time in Boston and I can’t imagine the atmosphere. I personally stopped watching the Celtics when legends retired (Bird, Parish, McHale, etc.) and the new stars literally died (Reggie Lewis, Len Bias). The team philosophy for a number of years seemed to be to try to stay .500. This year, I’ve started watching a little more basketball – about 10 games compared to the 72 I used to watch. Yes, I’m a fair-weather fan, but I think it’s reasonable considering the circumstances. So let’s dedicate this set of links to the Boston Celtics.

  • At Digerati Life this week, we’re given the motto work smarter not harder with increase your salary without increasing your work. An example to this philosophy is to follow the money. Just beware of your cost of living expenses!
  • Are you in financial trouble? Generation X Finance gives ten steps to take when you are in financial trouble from negotiating old loans to asking for a pay raise.
  • Ever wonder what the best cash back credit cards are? At the Sun’s Financial Diary find out what percentage you can get and where you can get it.
  • Here is a simple way to save money on food that keeps you from spending you hard earned money at Starbucks. Breakfast! Blip Blap explains that breakfast stops your cravings for midmorning junk. So it’s not only smart on your wallet but smart for your health.
  • Summer is here and that means going to theme parks. Money Smart Life provides several stout ideas on how to save money at amusement parks from your food and admission to hotels and souvenirs.
  • Over at Million Dollar Journey this week learn how to hedge against your bills by owning the company. If you own stock you’ll get dividends to pay for or pay you more than your monthly bills. Check out the dividends achievers list provided in this post.
  • Do you know what credit card arbitrage is? My Dollar Plan presents 0% Balance Transfer Credit Card Offers providing a list of credit cards that offer this currently and how to make it work for you.
  • Do you know why absolute real estate auctions are big deals? Mighty Bargain Hunter explains simply that they have to sell it at the last price offered which could be as low as a dollar and the auction house would have to sell it. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, doesn’t it? Be warned though, you’re not liking going to get it for a dollar. Read why.
  • Do you play the balance transfer game? Or want to learn more about it? Over at NoCreditNeeded read the guest post from Five Cent Nickel on credit card companies want your money to read the rewards and risks of the game.
  • We always knew that TV was a time waster, but have you ever really wondered just what you’ve lost because you watched TV? At Free Money Finance learn how to save money and improve your life just by turning off your TV.
  • I was included in a couple of carnivals as well. Check them out. I also want to thank MSN for highlighting my article on snowforting – even if everyone missed the satire behind the post.

    Filed Under: Links Tagged With: balance transfer credit card, boston celtics, cash back credit cards, Celtics, cost of living expenses, fair weather fan, financial trouble, Game Seven, how to save money, len bias, reggie lewis, Snowforting, starbucks, team philosophy

    As Seen In…

    Join and Follow

    RSS Feed
    RSS Feed

    Follow Me on Pinterest

    Search The Site

    Recent Comments

    • Terri on Happy National Consumer Protection Week!
    • Master Closer on Is Jeunesse a Scam?
    • J. Money on Invest in Sports Players?
    • Lazy Man on Stay Safe a Stock Market Bubble/Crash
    • Lazy Man on Making SMART 2021 Goals

    Please note that we may have a financial relationship with the companies mentioned on this site. We frequently review products or services that we have been given access to for free. However, we do not accept compensation in any form in exchange for positive reviews, and the reviews found on this site represent the opinions of the author.


    © Copyright 2006-2021 · Perfect Plan Publishing, Inc. · All Rights Reserved · Privacy Policy · Advertising · A Narrow Bridge Media Design