Quit Like a Millionaire
For a good laugh, I'd say to read The Latte Factor, but I'll just post the review I tried getting published on various FIRE sites. It was rejected mostly due to not fitting the theme of their sites, and possibly because FIRE is generally a positive environment, and people don't want to be dicks to each other.
Latte Factor Book Review
Fans of David Bach know that he keeps it simple. By making automatic contributions, you can set and forget your retirement. I first heard Bach while listening to the Afford Anything podcast during the release of The Latte Factor. It piqued my interest and I read it with 2 of my daughters.
First, we’ll discuss what the book is, what happens, and then bash – I mean, thoughtfully discuss – it mercilessly. Throughout it all, I hope you have a good time for both my accurate claims and the secondary bonus that maybe I’m kind of a jealous jerk.
Enjoy!
What is the Latte Factor?
This book is a novel about a young, dim, completely sexless woman named Zoey. Zoey works for a print magazine in New York City (in 2019) and has a lot of debt, low pay, and is good friends with a boss who values her in all the ways an employee can be valued save for paying them enough.
Zoey also has a favorite coffee spot near her home where she takes book-ended refuge in the morning and evening from all of her hard work.
One day while out for lunch (she never brown-bags) with her underpaying-boss-frenemy, Zoey is guilt-ridden by an opportunity to get a promotion and pay raise at another company. She hasn’t told anyone, and doesn’t know what to do – save herself, or stay under the friendly boot of her boss.
As fate would have it, her boss, perhaps having been called as a reference, tells her to talk to the man at the coffee shop – Henry.
Now, after listening to the “Afford Anything” interview, I was worried that Henry would be a white guy with dreadlocks. Thankfully, he’s not. We don’t actually know what he looks like, or what anyone looks like, but I would like to think there’d be an obligation to point this out. Henry’s older – we know that much – but he could be 45 or 85; there’s really no telling. I don’t think he’s Polynesian, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t morbidly obese, nor does he have acne scarring, but that’s all just speculation.
What isn’t speculation is that Henry knows the 3 secrets of becoming wealthy:
1. Pay yourself first
2. Make it automatic
3. Live rich now
How 1 and 2 aren’t a single secret, I’m not sure. And Live Rich Now is never accurately defined, and barely really alluded to in the 160 page barrel of horse apples into which Bach wants us to bite.
At one point, Zoey realizes out loud to Henry that maybe she’s blowing all her dough on retail lattes, to which, rather than say, “yeah, dude, I’m making bank here! You could have fully funded a Roth last year” Henry, who Zoey doesn’t yet know owns the place, including the entire giant building, doubles back harder than this dude escaping a furry stampede, and states in no uncertain terms that she does not have to stop buying lattes and scones. He says it repeatedly, like his life depends on it.
I’ll get back to that point later, because I do agree to some extent.
At the end of the book, Zoey makes some positive changes, but also a humongous mistake. She not only doesn’t take the pay raise and promotion, but doesn’t even present it to her boss – who is surely evil-incarnate – to match. She just keeps her low-paying job, but somehow magically can afford a nice camera and vacations, and buys a long-desired photograph from the coffee shop she always admired.
Zoey gets swindled at work and play, and we’re left standing by to watch the trainwreck.
Positive Notes on This Book
I read this with my older daughters, and we had a laugh-riot-good-time. Because the use of language is so sophomoric, we occasionally threw in our own twists, and would sometimes accurately call each other out, like the time I said that Zoey’s financial situation “hit her like a truck full of chickens,” and when my daughter had Zoey tell Henry to “draw me like your French girls, Henry.”
Just like watching a bad movie, we came to love the book.
The lessons, though, of pay yourself first and make it automatic weren’t worth 160 pages. I still don’t know what live richly now means, though I do live richly now when I’m sitting on my balcony with a friend on a nice night with a cigar and glass of bourbon. But if I was the main character a book called The Bourbon Factor the drug pusher would convince me I could stay buzzed all day and it would be fine – as though I wasn’t an embarrassment to my family and betrayer of my personal dreams and goals, not to mention my liver, just so long as I help get him from little liquor shop to major wine warehouse.
Why I Agree with Henry about Going to the Café
I mostly make my own coffee, and rarely get lattes out of the house.
However, our pals at Millennial Revolution pointed out in their wonderful book (BUY NOW!!!) Quit Like a Millionaire that only a true dope would honestly think that the cup of coffee that gives them legit daily satisfaction would be worth trading away in exchange for $106,000 a lifetime later.
After all, why stop at coffee when you can save:
• $1.00 for each condom you don’t use by remaining celibate
• Extra savings on unused gas by not seeing your Nana on her deathbed
• $10.00 someone gave you for a toll when you used an EZ-Pass that doesn’t belong to you
{Readers, feel free to add more examples into the comments section!}
On a last note, I’d like to point out that some reporters on the book never read it, but others got it on a meta level. For example this CNBC article states that “giving up coffee can make you rich,” proving they didn’t read it, while Janet Authorine calls the devious swindler, Henry, a “barista” in quotes, showing that she really gets it.
Regarding the now-shamed-faced CNBC, let’s get past the fact that the novel literally says the opposite in dialogue between poor Zoey and the duplicitous Henry, who, by the way, never comps her one time! and let me repeat, instead, that the book is completely hilarious – so much so I feel compelled to encourage the general public that they, too, must check it out.
