There’s a well known rule of thumb: Making your own espresso at home vs. buying it at your coffeehouse saves thousands of dollars through time. But, how much money you save is actually not the point of this exercise. The point of it is that it serves to exercise your spending ‘muscle’ and keep that ‘muscle’ elastic.
What do I mean by that? The money saved by forgoing espresso made at your coffeehouse is not the largest value of this exercise. That’s not to say you would not save money through time. It’s to say that it’s the wrong focus.
The Right Focus
That’s because each time you make a habit out of exchanging something for an alternative that results in saving money, you are training yourself to consider options instead of defaulting to the preferred one.
You are exercising your lifestyle ‘muscle’ and by doing so you are introducing elasticity to your lifestyle.
There are many things we spend money on. Some of them are necessary items that we don’t give much thought to, but others may have some wiggle room. Each time we practice elasticity and build it as a habit we are building up our ability to be flexible on a (what could be quite literal) dime.
While wealth is not built from forgoing espresso from a coffeehouse vs. home, it’s partially built from the habit of that decision.
Practicing the habit of taking the lesser expensive route in saving money keeps our lifestyle elastic : We learn to make a tradeoff that perhaps is not the most convenient one.
Lifestyle elasticity is crucial to meeting your financial goals. It allows you to be flexible in times of financial setbacks or in times of expediting a financial goal (e.g. early retirement).
And that is how making your espresso at home vs buying at your coffeehouse is not the point of this very literal exercise.
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