In defense of the “dumb” purchase

I know this argument well, because I spend a great deal of my time around people who work in money. Financial counsellors, planners, advisors, and accountants—all of them people who genuinely care about helping Canadians make smarter decisions. To be fair, they are not entirely wrong. Small expenses really do add up, lifestyle creep is real, and mindless spending can quietly erode financial stability over time.

But somewhere along the line, something went sideways in the way we talk about spending. Personal finance stopped being about building a sustainable life and started becoming an endless optimization exercise, one in which every dollar must be justified, maximized, and stripped of emotion. And sometimes, the spreadsheet is simply wrong.

My dumb purchase

Mine is a daily Tim Hortons medium black decaf. Yes, you read that correctly: I spend $1.92 every single day on brown flavoured water. Occasionally, if I am feeling particularly reckless, I upgrade to a $4.15 Starbucks tall decaf Americano. And I feel guilty about this every morning.

Not because we cannot afford it, and not because my wife minds—she could not care less. The guilt comes from somewhere else entirely. The world of personal finance has conditioned many of us to believe that the daily coffee is the ultimate symbol of financial irresponsibility. Eliminate it, the thinking goes, and somehow you unlock retirement, your children’s education fund fills itself, and financial peace descends from the skies.

That guilt is so deeply ingrained that I think five times before putting a decaf coffee on an expense report when I travel for work. Oddly, I felt less guilty when it still had caffeine, because at least then I could rationalize the purchase as functionally necessary. Now it just feels like I am paying for warm flavoured water and a moment of peace.

And yet I still buy it, every single day. Not because I need the caffeine, but because I like the damn taste. More importantly, I buy it because of what that coffee represents.

The $1.92 ritual

By the time I take that first sip, I have usually been awake since 5 a.m. I have cleared emails and probably created more work for the people I work with, stood side-by-side with my wife and prepped breakfasts and lunches, gotten our daughter ready for school, and finished my daily workout. Only then comes the ritual.

I get my coffee, sit in the car, turn on my morning playlist, and for exactly 20 minutes I just exist. No calls, no notifications, no demands; just music, gratitude, and a warm cup of brown water. That $1.92 is not really about the coffee at all. It is my daily reminder to pause before the chaos of the day fully begins, and my signal to myself that however busy life gets, I still deserve 20 quiet minutes to think, breathe, and reset.

How do you calculate the return on that? And more importantly, should you even try?

The problem with optimization culture

Personal finance culture often treats spending as binary. There is good spending and bad spending, needs and wants, and very little room in between. But life is rarely that clean.

The irony is that many of the people who obsess over eliminating tiny discretionary purchases completely ignore the decisions that genuinely move the needle—things like housing costs, vehicle expenses, high-interest debt, inconsistent saving habits, or unstable income. Meanwhile, we direct an enormous amount of guilt toward a single coffee.

The “latte factor,” popularized by author David Bach in his book of the same name, was originally meant to illustrate how small recurring expenses compound over time, and mathematically that is true. A daily $5 purchase, invested consistently over decades, really can grow into a meaningful amount of money.

But critics of the concept have long argued that the conversation became distorted, particularly in an era when housing, childcare, groceries, and transportation have dramatically outpaced wage growth. For many Canadians, eliminating coffee is not the difference between financial struggle and financial freedom. That does not mean small spending is irrelevant; it means context matters.

Why deprivation budgets fail

There is also a behavioural side to this conversation that personal finance advice sometimes misses. Rigid budgets tend to fail for the same reason crash diets fail, which is that total deprivation is almost impossible to sustain.

Research consistently shows that people are more likely to stick to long-term plans when there is room for flexibility, enjoyment, and intentional rewards along the way. Psychologists have found that willpower and self-control are finite resources that deplete under constant restriction, and behavioural research on budgeting has found that rigid, tightly tracked budgets can actually backfire, while approaches that build in flexibility prove more sustainable. A budget that includes small, meaningful joys often turns out to be more durable than one built entirely around restriction.

That distinction matters, because there is a real difference between intentional spending and unconscious spending. My daily coffee is intentional, and so is my gym membership. Both pass what I think of as my “greater good” test, because both contribute positively to my mental health, physical well being, and ability to function at a high level. That does not mean every indulgence automatically qualifies. Far from it.