“Women who drink more than five cups of coffee a day may be reducing their risk of one type of breast cancer, new research suggests.”

Hmm.. of course.. by reading more into the article you will find the following statement:

“However, a U.S. expert warns that the new finding about reduction in risk for ER-negative breast cancer could be due to chance.”

Seriously?? Chance?? Isn’t the whole point of a ‘study’ to obtain facts? I mean – I could state something like “eating carrots will make you fat” and if I do my study on a bunch of people whom I give carrots to and they eat everything else under the sun – pretty sure that’s not much of a study??

That’s similar to the article I read where they said that too much water can be bad for you.. ummm.. what? What are they trying to do? Get people NOT to drink water? Seriously?

Anyhow that’s my little evening rant, I now must go in search of mortgage information to find the best mortgage and best annuity rates out there as my mortgage is up for renewal soon and I’m contemplating my choices.

They claim the factors for the increase are:

• Cost of sugar has increased 40%
• Cost of wheat has DOUBLED in the last year
• Wholesale coffee prices have DOUBLED in the last year

For you math addicts out there, at $1.72 for a timmies-a-day habit is going to cost you $48.16 a month if you had one every day, which is $577.92 a year. Or how about this… give up coffee when you’re at the age of 30 and save that $577.92 for 5 years, at 10% if you left it for 30 years.. you’d have $43,438.71. Or how about if you kept putting that $577.92 and that’s all you invested for 30 years.. at 10% a year how does $108,023.22 sound to you?

There are a lot of things that you could do with an extra $48 a month, the one that I just thought of recently was to install one of those smart home systems to monitor my house while I’m not around, or heck I could plunk it down on my phone bill, put that money towards a fill up of my car, enjoy a nice dinner out.. lots of things..

I’m glad I brew my own.. that’s all I’m going to say on that one.

Well, apparently there’s more money in coffee than I thought – as those shops are ALL still in business and doing quite well… but this is about MY first visit to Starbucks tonight.

So I went there tonight to meet a couple getting married next year whom want me to be their photographer.. I couldn’t be happier as they are an awesome, fun, exciting couple and I think it’s going to be a GREAT time. Ok, onto the experience..

So I just wasn’t in the coffee mood tonight, so I decided to go with a Hot Chocolate. My first thoughts on the whole experience.. THIS PLACE IS CRAZY PRICEY! Sure, they have lots of varieties and have lots of different choices, etc.. but good lord, average price of their smallest drink was $3.10 ++. WTF?? I’m assuming most people don’t frequent this place like they do a Timmies do they?

Getting past that, my Hot Chocolate was only around $2.50 or so, which seemed ok to me – so I ordered it. The ‘barista’ or whatever they call themselves took my order and she was quite friendly. Of course – it helps that I was also quite friendly as I had mentioned this was my first time here at Starbucks and she said that if I had any questions and ‘Welcome to Starbucks’ and the whole thing. The HR department did right by their staff, everyone that I spoke to was very friendly and nice – and they’re talented as well.. you have to be if you’re going to remember all those different drinks types! Moccha-Frappa-Half-Caf-Chino-Choco-Moccha-Venti with a blah blah blah…. good lord.

Really the only other thing to talk about is the actual location itself. Obviously being where it is, it’s at a prime real estate location.. one of the main corners of downtown but who gives two hoots about that anyhow – was it nice inside? Yep.. it was.. very cozy. There were lots of people sitting doing laptop work, reading, chilling out.. I guess this is where I sort of thought I ‘could’ be a Starbucks person.. Why? Well.. on occasion, where I wanted to get out of the house, do some work on my iPad or laptop or read or whatever .. just chill out, I could go to Starbucks.. order an over-priced drink and sit and enjoy it while doing whatever I wanted with their free wifi.

If Liz and I wanted to research our Vacation that’s coming up and perhaps look into what we’re going to do for the last part of the week, it would be a great way to just get away from everything and concentrate on that.. (we were thinking of heading to New Orleans, or getting an Outer Banks vacation rentals and just relaxing) – in any case, it would be a great spot to do that.

So I guess my feelings towards Starbucks has slightly changed.. I still think they are really expensive, but I also think that everything else about them perhaps warrants a little higher price tag. What do you think?

This week I ran across some pretty interesting posts that I’d like to share with you all.. and since I’m up early – I’m going to post them so you can peruse them during your morning coffee (yes.. I did just use peruse in proper context before 8am).

The first post I’d like to draw your attention to is actually an event happening here in Charlottetown tomorrow from 10am – 2pm.. it’s a fund-raiser for the Tsunami/Earthquake ravaged Japan being held at the Confederation Court Mall. Please go take a read and come on down if you have the time or perhaps can donate a prize.. lots of information located at the 1000 Cranes For Japan Facebook Page.

My favorite site Lifehacker has posted some more tips on getting a better cup of coffee. I’m not too concerned with this due to the fact I just got my Keurig machine and love it – but hey, for those of you whom don’t.. some great ideas/tips in there for the coffee lover in all of us.

One of the last things before I go to bed usually is do some reading via my iPad, my iPhone, or computer.. did you know that this could be causing me to lose sleep? Reuters.com has an article on just that.. worth a read. “Nearly 95 percent of people questioned in an NSF study said they used some type of electronics in the hour before going to bed, and about two-thirds admitted they do not get enough sleep during the week.”

And one more.. since I’m guilty of this (although not in regards to maternity clothes of course), Apartment therapy offers tips on keeping clothes that you’ve worn once – but are not dirty – organized. You know what I’m talking about right? I know personally I hang my once-worn jeans on the side of my hamper. Obviously, I’m not going to wash a pair of jeans every time I wear them for 1/2 a day.. especially when all I’m doing in them is sitting in a chair.. they aren’t dirty.. come on! Anyhow.. a few tips worth reading in order to help organize that and avoid what I hate.. ‘folding’ every day

Yeah, great idea.. 4 stores and $200+ later we’re heading home with a brand new Keurig coffee machine. Talk about your impulse purchase eh?

Ok, truth be told I love the coffee maker so I wanted to let you know why we bought one of those instead of the others.. as they all had advantages and disadvantages over the other – but what really separates them all is what you plan on doing with it.

The Coffee Machine Comparison

My original thought was to go with the Tassimo. Of course, it also helps that we were at Walmart and I believe that’s the only one that they sell there. Standing in the isle of the coffee section I looked like a big moron using my iPhone to look up the reviews online and some of the benefits and drawbacks of the Tassimo. The advantages? Well.. one glaring benefit – cappuccinos, espressos and lattes. At first this sounded like a no-brainer, I love those specialty coffee drinks every so often, and the Keurig doesn’t do that.. let’s get it! Well, Liz wanted to do some price checking, so off to Sears we went.

Sears is pretty good in their coffee maker selection and had all three of the top brands in front of us to try to decide. I believe we spent at least 45 minutes going back and forth and reading, checking out, price checking, etc..etc.. This was our first look at the different Keurig and Dolce Gusto machines.

The Keurig machine was the one I’ve seen most often, we head to “Timothy’s” on University avenue every so often and I see all the different types of coffees that they sell for the Keurig in there, and I’ve just generally seen them all over the place. “So what’s the benefit?” I thought.. well, one HUGE benefit which ended up winning me over by a long margin. The ability to brew your own coffee.

Sure, you needed to purchase another product called “My K-cup” which was $15-ish dollars, but that was small beans compared to the fact that I’d be able to continue purchasing my Tim Hortons or Robins grinds for $6. This also meant that after the initial cost of the machine, my “cost per cup” would only increase very slightly due to the fact that I likely would be using a bit more coffee with the “My K-Cup” filling it up every day.. perhaps I wouldn’t use more, I’m really not sure. In the end however, this feature won me over any of the others. Truthfully, I’d have gone with one of the other machines if they offered this feature.

The Dolce Gusto from Nescafe was the new kid on the block and looked pretty funky from a design perspective. The benefits to it were the fact it could do certain cold drinks, plus something about the pressure that it produced in compared to the others. Unfortunately, no brewing my own coffee – so I really never gave it a second thought.

My Coffee Maker

So, I’ve had the Keurig for a few days now. I have to admit that I was almost as excited to use this sucker than I was for the iPad I purchased a few weeks ago.. isn’t that nuts? I’m not sure why.. but I can tell you that I’m still excited to use it.

The version we purchased was the B60 Special Edition. This version had 3 choices of cup sizes (although all of them seem small to me), but I’ll go into that in a minute.

Drawbacks

There are some drawbacks to the Keurig that I have come across:

1. Largest cup size is too damn small. I’m used to filling up my ‘togo’ cup in the morning, however I figured out a workaround, simply brew a medium and a small one after the other. Seems to give me the same amount of coffee I’m used to without too much taste compromise.
2. Waste. I think I’ve been recycling too long, but all those K-Cups seem very wasteful to me. Fortunately I’m using the my My K-Cup which reduces any plastic waste – but let’s face it, I’m going to use a lot of those K-Cups as well.. c’mon, let’s get a recyclable product for this.
3. Cost. This holds true with any of the coffee makers. Obviously when I did the math with how much I was paying per cup before with the French press, it was pennies.. maybe $0.10 a cup. With the Keurig, most of the 18 packs are around $12.. so not even taking taxes into account, it’s increasing the cost to about $0.66 a cup.. which can get pricey if not using the My K-Cup, which barely increases existing costs.
4. Addiction. I just thought of this, but man have I drank a lot of coffee since we bought this machine, it’s not such a bad thing as I’m sure there are worse vices out there – but yeah, convenience is there, so I take advantage.. touching up photos in the evening, you can bet there’s a cup of joe right next to me.  Perhaps this should be in the benefits column as well?

Benefits

1. My version has a timer. What that means is that I can set it to start heating up the hot water at 7AM and when I get to the machine, it’s ready to go. It also shuts down at 8AM so Liz has a chance to get her coffee as well. This saves energy and is a great feature.
2. Quick. From press of a button to steaming cup of coffee in less than a minute. Yes, really. I LOVE this about the coffee maker.. no waiting, I think this is one feature everyone else also loves a lot about it.
3. Variety. Seems that Keurig is the dominant player in the market, so there are a LOT of coffee choices out there for it, as well as hot chocolate and some other specialty drinks. Liz loves the Kahlua flavored coffee, and truthfully.. I don’t blame her.. some of these coffees smell unreal!
4. Company. “Want a coffee”? Most people would say now immediately as they know the hassle of getting the filter, waiting for it to perk, etc..etc.. with this machine, it almost becomes a topic of discussion as you can ask what kind they want, and not have to worry about how long it takes to brew.. it only takes one minute (when the water is heated).

Conclusion

Ok I have to wrap this up – but I just wanted to put it out there that I love this machine right now, and judging by the amount of responses I received on my Facebook page once I posted that I purchased one, there are a LOT of people out there whom also love theirs. It’s almost like a little club of “closet” Keurig lovers… who knew?

I for one.. am very glad to join the club.. coffee anyone?

Today I put two of the items that I wrote down in action – they are:

1. for every coffee I buy, I put the exact same amount in a savings account
2. every two weeks I’m funding my TFSA with $50 automatically

Buy a Coffee – Save a Coffee

So for option 1, it may not seem like a lot to simply put in $1.65 or $1.71 into a savings account, but you know. I have always blogged about the ‘real cost’ of coffee (especially if you buy one from Tim Hortons or Robins every day) and it can get pretty pricey. By basically putting away the $1.65 into savings – truth be told I don’t feel so bad about it. Sure you may say that the coffee I just had cost me $3.30 by the time it’s said and done, but did it really? I didn’t spend the other $1.65, I saved it.

Saving I find is psychological, and if I can justify some of the purchases I make by saving the exact same amount, then I’m ok with it. I still don’t drink a morning coffee anymore like I used to and generally only take one when I need a good pick me up.

I also plan on doing the same thing for when I eat out, or when I generally purchase something that is a ‘want’ and not a ‘need’. Eating out also counts, so that Blizzard that I bought – yeah, it’s going to cost me double out of my spending account.

Once I have $50 saved up, I will put it into my TFSA. Not only does this increase my savings, but it will also deter me from spending needlessly if I don’t have the money to cover the savings portion.

TFSA Auto-Contributions

I’m not sure why I haven’t been doing this before, but I’m also going to be adding $50 every pay to my TFSA. This is going to be the beginnings of my "Emergency Fund" which I hope to have in place in a few years. I could go on about what an Emergency Fund is and why it’s important, but I’ll save that for another post.

The TFSA (Tax Free Savings Account) to me make a lot of sense. Can you imagine if I turned say $5000 into $50,000 over 10 years? I could take that money out tax free!! SWEET! That’s the idea anyhow, but of course I need to save up the capital first.

As Gail wrote in her book – in order to have $5000, you need to have $500, and in order to have $500, you need to have $50.. so yeah – I have to start somewhere and I plan on starting now, after all – if I don’t save money for myself.. who is going to?

How do you save money?

Coffee Headaches

So I’m on day 6 of giving up coffee and I have to say that it’s going well. However it wasn’t for the first few days. It’s odd, you read about what’s to expect to happen when you give up coffee but you sort of think “that doesn’t sound like it would happen to me” – but it did. Day 1 was fine, a little too easy to be honest – perhaps it was my body telling me “you’re not seriously giving up coffee are you?”.

Then day 2 hit.

All day I was so tired that I could barely keep my eyes open, but that was ok, I was expecting a headache that didn’t arrive… until later that evening. It arrived around 6pm on Day 2 and never left until mid Day 3 and it sucked. Once that was over it was the “I’m going to sleep all day” symptoms… Day 4 however, Monday, everything seems normal. Now today… I find things are a little better than normal. Perhaps it’s just me, but I seem more awake now and ready to do things than when I was drinking coffee every morning. Isn’t that weird?

I really can’t explain it – but I do seem more alert and active now (on Day 5, and today 6) than I did when I was drinking coffee. Perhaps that’s an over-exaggeration, but the fact that I took Liz’s bike (it’s a men’s bike – stop picturing it..) and drove it to Sobeys yesterday to get some hamburger buns is something I haven’t done for years.. in fact, I can’t even remember the last time I drove a bike more than a kilometer in recent memory.

So to sum up.. it’s going well, and I’m going to keep at it – they say day 10 is the point where it’s completely out of your system. I don’t have any headaches now and am pretty pumped about sticking with this.

Anyhow today – July 14th, I’m going to try to give up my morning coffee. There are a few reasons that I’m thinking about doing this but mainly it’s that I think it’s become a habit which I don’t really think is doing anything for me, and I think I could be consuming other things (water maybe?) that would be more beneficial.

Before I give up coffee however I did mention during one of my last posts that I was going to find out how much we pay for our morning coffee’s as opposed to buying one from Tim Hortons or Robins every morning. Well, it was June 21st when we bought and started using the can of Tim Hortons regular grind for our french press, we ran out on Monday – giving us a total of 3 weeks on one can. Of course I almost have to subtract a week there due to the fact that I was in Moncton and Liz was at the Cavendish Beach Music Festival so those were days that we weren’t able to consume any – Instead what I’ll do is just convert it to days and then cups. So 3 weeks is 21 days – multiply by two in order to serve us both with coffee is 42 cups – but then take away I’d say 8 days that we didn’t drink coffee (at least not from the french press).. so a semi-approximate number of cups from the can would be 34. The coffee costs about $6 to purchase… works out to paying about $0.17 a cup.

How’s that for a good money saver?

Ok, so back to the topic at hand. I finished reading a rather lengthy article on the effects of coffee (both good and bad) and it’s pretty much a known fact that after awhile coffee does nothing for you if you drink it every day. It just becomes habit – which I don’t like having, especially non-healthy ones. It’s also sort of a known fact that I will likely get a headache and experience withdrawal symptoms over the next 10 or so days if I don’t have any coffee as well – I’m not looking forward to this.

I started this afternoon, and instead of going and getting a coffee – I hoofed it down to the Clover Farm on my break and was a little surprised when I picked up 3 apples and went to the checkout – cost of $3.29 total! Ouch!! Maybe this isn’t such a great idea??? I actually put one back since I only had $3 on me – and I can tell you that it certainly didn’t last as long as a coffee either. Well, the good news is that apples are a natural fat burner, and obviously better for me than coffee. I will try to research some healthy alternatives – but in the meantime I’m not looking forward to the headaches that I may get while not drinking coffee.

To the topic of this post, a conversation started at dinner Sunday night which I thought was a very interesting fact – and I hadn’t thought about it before then. It was the relationship or how similar coffee prices are getting to beer prices.

Large Double-Double at Tims – $1.68 (generally)… 1 bottle of beer ($20.99/12) $1.75. What’s scary is that my Robins coffee over in Stratford is actually $1.71 (why they would be more than Tim Hortons is beyond me..) Anyhow, so there is less then 10 cents difference between buying a beer at the liquor store and buying a coffee.. HOW RIDICULOUS IS THAT?! If you wanted to get really technical.. you can take back the bottles for beer and get $1.50 back for a dozen.. yeah, so that means that you’re paying only $1.62 for a bottle of beer.. which makes it CHEAPER than coffee!

If you wanted to talk about markup.. wow!! At least the ingredients in beer makes you think that some magical formula was created over time to make it taste so great. You’ve got barley, hopes, yeast, water, sometimes spices.. you need to ferment and you need to be extremely careful in the creation of the beer. Coffee ingredients?…coffee beans.

I don’t know the exact amount Timmies and Robins have marked up the price of their coffees, but you better believe that they have it set at an amount that will keep you buying, but still not scare away too many customers. Let’s say a pound of coffee today costs $9.00 give or take – that’ll make 30 cups of coffee.. yeah so that’s around 30 cents a cup. And they charge $1.68 for it.. which is over 450% profit margin (not including wages, etc). Holy smokes!! Do I EVER want to get in on that business right?? Well, why do you think they have a Starbucks, Timothys, Robins, Second Cup, Great Canadian Bagel, Tim Hortons, Beanz, etc all within about 30 seconds walking distance from each other downtown here? And that’s for a Tim Hortons coffee.. can you imagine the markup on a Starbucks?

Like I said before, at least with Beer you’ve got a bunch of different ingredients and you know that it takes some skill and effort to make that beer and replicate it over and over and over again. Yes, the markup is likely huge on beer as well, but certainly not the crazed amount coffee is.

Obviously we, the consumer can combat these prices by purchasing our own coffee – buying our own, bringing your own cup, etc. For myself and Liz, I calculate that we get about 2 weeks of morning coffees (made from our french press) for about $6.00 – that’s 14 coffees or about $0.43 a day each. I’t may be more or less than 2 weeks but I’ll know for sure soon as I have to rebuy a can today so I’ll know how long it lasts.

I still need about 4 cups this morning after the weekend though.. wow.

PEI Liquor Control Commission Latest Prices

IRAC = Useless

Ever since I  actually calculated how little the $0.02 movement in price per liter amounted to at the pumps every couple of weeks.. I really can’t believe how I used to rush to the pumps or used to, the night before gas was going to move in price. Let’s just take a look shall we?

Ok.. so, the other day IRAC announced that they were cutting the price of gas by 1.5 cents per liter. Most of us drive 45 – 50 liter tanks with our cars, so that’s a grand savings of $0.60. BIG WHOOP! Seriously.. even when it was moving by 7 – 10 cents per liter.. that was still a MAX of $4.00 per fill up (and that only happened a few times!)

Now you may look at this number and say “Yeah.. $4.00 may not be a big deal to you Len, but that’s a LOT for me!”. To which I say.. BULLSHIT! If $4.00 is a lot of money to you, then I suggest you stop wasting the $0.50 actually driving to get the gas in the first place. I suggest you save that $0.50 and head to the Internet to visit some coupon sites like www.save.ca in which you could save likely $20 a month in things that you’re going to buy anyhow!

There are other ways to save a little bit of money every day too, I know myself.. since I’m taking my coffee to work every day, I’m saving likely close to $10 a week in coffee (I would have bought at least one a day and sometimes two).. which adds up to over $40 a month and almost $500 a year! I wonder how much I could save if I shopped around for things like a life insurance quote which I’m paying for now, car insurance, etc..etc..

Similar to gas prices, the price of furnace oil also fluxuates quite a bit, and since you purchase a LOT more furnace oil (or do we?) than gas.. you’d think it would affect you more right? Well.. not necessarily, taking an example of a common household which uses say, 2000 L of oil to heat their home. If the price (use Oct 1st as an example) moves 2 cents per liter (which is now 70.6 cents per Liter approx).. then over the course of the year.. you’re being affected a total cost of $40.. again.. big whoop.

Now, that being said.. 2 years ago when the price of oil went from 0.65/L to 1.60/L.. yes.. it definitely affects us.. however I believe that was more a result of price manipulation than any REAL reason, and I don’t see any of that bullshit happening anytime soon.

Moral of the story?? Stop paying attention to the gas price at the pump and pay more attention to how much you’re spending at Tim Horton’s every day