It's always electric

Both of mine are higher in the summer.

I just get Folgers crystals and heat the water on a gas stove. Win Win

At the salon a few months back, and a lady said her husband gave her a card specifically for Dunkin' Donuts purchases, so they could keep track. Last year she spent over $3,000! 😵

I mean if you call it $3500 over 365 days last year that’s like $9.60 a day at Dunkin

Which isn’t great by any means but that’s basically an average of a large coffee, breakfast sandwich and tax every day

That's insane! I make my Dunkin' coffee at home. It's also ridiculously easy to make croissant sandwiches. I am not saying that I don't get drive thru on occasion (who doesn't love their little hash browns!), but over $3,000! That's the cost of a vacation! My money has gone to vet visits for the past few years, so that sort of convenience wouldn't be my sort of luxury.

I actually just went to Dunkin for the first time in months today. I used to spend so much money on coffee, but since the pandemic I've almost exclusively made it at home.

Electric for sure. I don’t really like coffee, most of it is pretty gross and it just seems like an unnecessary money pit to me. I used to get a mocha coolatta like once every two years but that’s it.

Finally got my wife out of the dunk's habit....

We are about 35$ with my beans for my espresso and her's for the drip.

Electric bill is massive for reasons, our average daily usage is significantly down, but the price is almost double.

Most months my electric bill is less than $7 (Versant minimum), so I definitely spend more than that at Dunkin, but to be fair I’d need to factor in the cost of the solar panels over their expected life span to get my true monthly electricity cost

We’re at like $20 a day for Starbucks. :(

Dang, that’s over 7k a year. What’s your house hold annual income range? Are you a home owner? That is more than our mortgage, property taxes, and home owners insurance last year… we bought a 4 bed 2 bath in Oakland on 5+ acres to convert into a homestead almost 2 years ago(with a sizable down payment) with your Dunkin’ budget.

We pay about $75/mo for coffee for two people. Granted, we don't go to Dunkin or Starbucks or anything like that. We order beans in 5 lb increments from places like Tandem, Speckled Ax and Onyx. We store them in the freezer in mason jars to keep them fresh.

We pay $13.73/mo for electricity.

I guess coffee wins.

Oh electric bill, easily.

When you don't drink coffee it's an open-and-shut case.

I will await the throwing of the tomatoes.

Haha wow. Enough to cover my Starbucks lol. Yeah we own a house in Saco. It’s mostly because we travel all the time and I’ve been addicted to their iced tea lemonade. So that plus oatmeal ends up being like $20 every morning.

What a brain fart, I swear I reread and saw Dunkin’ like twice 😂

Lol. I’d go to Dunkin if their iced tea wasn’t shit. Their avocado toast is fine but I’ve heard it leads to financial ruin for us millennials. (1990 here as well!)

Hahaha hope 33 treats you right! I haven’t been to either a Dunkin or a Starbucks in some time but I make a pretty solid organic lady grey maple syrup Arnold Palmer that is a delightful way to start the day. Probably costs like 18 bucks a glass if I calculated cost of labor as anything remotely reasonable but since I am doing the labor…who cares I swear I am saving money sugaring and growing lemons in my windows!!

Well... I don't go to dunks anymore. I may try it every couple of months,but the local one sucks, the food is undercooked or the coffee tastes burnt, or tea is just super watered down... I try to give them a chance but man is it disappointing to spend money on shit food/drinks.

Same to you! That does sound really good. I’ll have to try to grow lemons sometime

Electric bill. Because I can make way better coffee at home than the crap Dunkin puts out.

Even when I was working, I made most of my coffee at home.

I took the prospective homeowners course in 1998 in Portland. The instructor said for most of us, we could maintain a fast food habit or buy a house, choose one; that it makes that much of a difference. He'd had to quit his daily corner store coffee and delicious sub that he loved & he missed it but it was worth it to be a homeowner.

Not saying those darned millennials just need to give up their avocado toast to solve all their problems. I know the struggle is real and has gotten realer. I did my share of picking up a slice & diet pepsi on the fly because I was tired and stressed, instead of making a sandwich and bringing a nice apple. I regret all the $$$ I wasted on convenience food over the years. It's even more crazy expensive now.

So far, I'm maintaining the same electric costs even with the increase by being meticulous with lights & ghost power draws, but the biggest gain has been putting my water heater on a timer. A couple hours a day keeps it safely hot enough for dishes & showers without cooling down so much it costs more to heat back up.

I think it's fine to make a conscious choice to spend that way if you want to and can do it. Just so it's not just slipping away under the radar so you don't realize where it's gone.

It's the most cost-effective, efficacious caffeine delivery system.

We’ve been making our own, it’s fine… 😭

Making our own coffee.. I wish I had some of my own solar panels though!

Wait what? Less than $7k for your mortgage, property taxes and insurance in a YEAR? I spend $1100/mo in rent in Waterville. And I’m not living in luxury. I hate this timeline.

Fresh beans, a quality grinder, and pour over brewing makes a much better cup of coffee than Dunkin or Starbucks. We could buy much cheaper beans, but we both love our coffee.

How is your electric bill so low? Solar??

Yes, solar. Obviously that project had a cost to it, but the last two massive increases have rapidly accelerated our payback period.

We actually paid a little extra each month last year to eat away at the principal balance, so we paid 600 a month which is 7200, 20 Starbucks bucks a day is 7300 a year. Our actual monthly payment was 552, it was adjusted and is now 648 and we are doing 700 a month which is 8400 a year. Here is where it gets wild. We have a 30 year fixed mortgage, by paying just the little extra each month we are going to pay off the house in under 24 years. We have a plan to roll what we pay toward other debts into the mortgage payment once the debts are eliminated. We plan to have the house paid off(including new solar array, heat pumps, orchard, greenhouse, wood stoves, sugar house, charging station, outbuildings, etc.) by the time I am 50. It is indeed one of the darkest timelines for many folks but there are bright spots!

I used to manage one. I was trained to think of regular customers as $x a year. Some of them spend a lot more than 3k, it's crazy.

You can also buy green beans around $300 for 50 lbs.

I’ll usually buy it once a year and then use my oven, popcorn roaster, or air roaster to roast about 1-3 pounds at a time.

It’s a nice comparison considering the average Dunkiner spends $300 a month

That's intriguing. Are they fairly easy to roast? Any good sources of green beans? Tandem is about $10/lb but maybe there are bulk discounts to be had somewhere?

I use sweetmarias. I used their customer site for testing blends, then their commercial site to buy in bulk. They even have some entry level roasting stuff for sale, the only downfall with the popcorn roaster is if you roast too much in 1 day the plastic barrier melts a bit.

Mostly easy to roast, it gets difficult if you’re looking for an extremely light roast. I don’t have HVAC so I usually set up a couple of fans to blow the smoke out the window. The sweet spot for me is to stop when the beans are finishing their “first crack” and start to enter the “second crack”. There’s tons of YouTube/material on roasting with ovens or cheaper roasting guides.

Thanks for the info. I might dip my toe into this over my next vacation!

I make my own coffee.

Dunkin budget is $5. Emergencies only.