Latte Factor Calculator

About this calculator

The Latte Factor, a term popularized by financial author David Bach, refers to small, easy-to-overlook recurring expenses — the classic example being a daily coffee purchase — that seem trivial individually but add up to a significant sum when totaled over months or years, and become even larger if that money had instead been invested and allowed to compound.

This calculator takes a small recurring expense (say, five dollars a day) and projects its cumulative cost over time, then compares it against what that same money would have grown to if invested at a given rate of return instead of spent. The point isn’t that anyone must give up coffee, but that small daily spending decisions carry a real, calculable opportunity cost, and seeing that number is meant to prompt a conscious choice rather than an automatic one.