TL;DR. Every individual purchase in this category is too small to argue with, which is precisely why nobody ever runs the annual number. Multiply price by frequency, look at the year and the five-year figure, and stop there. Then ask the only question that matters: is it worth that to me? Some of them will be, and the post that tells you to cut them all is not being honest with you. The vice cost calculator does the multiplication with your numbers, and the quit counter turns whatever you decide to drop into a running count instead of a promise.
There is a specific reason this arithmetic never gets done.
It is not laziness, and it is not denial. It is that every single transaction in this category is individually defensible. Four euros. Twelve. Nine ninety-nine a month. At the moment of purchase there is no version of you that objects, because at that scale the objection would be absurd. You would be the person arguing about a coffee.
The number only becomes strange at the annual scale, and the annual scale is exactly the one you never see. Your bank shows you transactions. Your card app shows you a month if you go looking. Nothing in your life is designed to show you a year of one small repeated decision.
So you have to build that view deliberately. It takes about four minutes.
The multiplication, and nothing more
Price of one occurrence, times how many times per period, times the number of periods in a year. That is it.
Daily thing: times 365. Weekly thing: times 52. Monthly thing: times 12.
I am labouring this because the temptation is to make it more sophisticated than it is, and sophistication is where this exercise goes to die. You do not need to model inflation. You do not need to guess how your consumption changes. You need one honest price and one honest frequency, and the frequency is the part people get wrong, because the answer to "how often do you get takeaway" is almost always lower than the answer your card statement gives.
Pull up three months of statements before you estimate. The gap between the two numbers is itself informative.
Category by category
Here is where I would actually look, roughly in the order that surprises people.
The daily coffee. The famous one, and the one that gets the most sneering commentary in both directions. It is a small daily number with the largest multiplier in the list, so it lands hard. It is also, for a lot of people, genuinely load-bearing. Run it, then hold the answer.
Takeaway and delivery. This is usually the biggest one, and it hides better than smoking because it does not have a name. It arrives as "we were tired on Wednesday" four times a month. Count the meals separately from the fees, because the fees are their own line item and they are the part people find hardest to defend once they see them summed.
Cigarettes or vapes. The category with the most obvious non-financial reasons attached, which I am not going to lecture you about. Financially it behaves like the coffee, at a multiple.
The round. Drinks out are lumpy rather than daily, so the frequency question matters more here than the price question. Three occasions a month at a real price is a different animal from the one occasion you remember.
The subscriptions you forgot. This is the only category on the list where the honest answer is usually "cut it" without any further thought, because you are not getting anything for the money. You are paying for a decision you made in 2023. Ten small monthly charges cost more per year than most people would guess, and the guess is low because each one is invisible.
The convenience tax. The small premium on the corner shop version, the express delivery, the airport version of a thing. Individually trivial, structurally identical to everything above.
The calculator ships with eight preset categories plus a custom entry, and each preset comes pre-filled with a default price. Overwrite all of them. Those defaults are assumptions someone wrote into the code, not researched averages for wherever you live, and everything is formatted in US dollars regardless of your currency. The tool is a multiplier. A multiplier is only as good as the number you feed it.
Per year, and per five years. Not per lifetime.
Once you have a yearly total, the natural next move is to extend it, and this is where most content in this genre goes off a cliff.
You have seen the format. Give up the coffee, retire early. Skip the takeaway, buy a house. Those pieces are doing something dishonest: they take a number that is real at one scale and stretch it to a scale where it stops meaning anything, because forty years of anything sounds enormous and nobody actually makes forty-year decisions about a Tuesday sandwich.
Year one and year five are the useful horizons. A five-year figure is long enough to feel real and short enough that you can picture the alternative. It is the difference between "that is a lot" and "that is a specific thing I did not get."
The calculator does have a projections tab that goes out to 1, 5, 10 and 20 years, and it also shows what the same monthly amount would come to at a fixed 7% assumed annual return, which is written into the code and cannot be edited. Treat that as an illustration of how compounding behaves, not as a prediction about any investment. Personally I look at the five-year spending column and ignore the rest.
There is one more conversion the tool offers and I think it earns its place: hours of work. You give it an hourly wage, or an annual salary that it divides by 2,080 hours, and it tells you how many hours a year you work to fund each line. It is a blunt version of an older idea. The careful version adjusts for tax and for the unpaid hours the job actually claims, and it lands considerably harder, but the blunt version is enough to rank a list.
The part most of these articles get wrong
Not every expensive habit is a bad one.
This should not be a controversial sentence and yet the entire genre is built on the opposite assumption: that cost is the same thing as waste, and that the correct response to a large annual number is guilt followed by elimination.
That framing fails for a simple reason. You are not trying to spend zero. You are trying to spend on the things you would choose if you could see them clearly, and there is no version of a good life where the answer to every recurring pleasure is no.
So the question is never "what does this cost." It is: is it worth that?
Some of them will be. The coffee that is really the ten minutes of walking to get it. The Friday round that is the only time you see those people. Say yes to those explicitly, write the number next to them, and stop feeling vaguely bad about them forever. That is a real outcome, and it is worth more than a cut.
What tends to fall out are the ones you had stopped noticing. Not the pleasures. The defaults.
Making the number visible beats trying harder
Guilt is a terrible operating system. It works for about nine days and then it converts into avoidance, which is why the annual arithmetic scares people off and why they do not go back to it.
The alternative is boring and it works better: keep the number somewhere you will see it again, and put a pause between the impulse and the purchase. The waiting-period approach is a whole method in itself, and I covered how to run it without turning the list into a wishlist in the 24 hour rule, done properly. If you want a harder reset for a fixed window instead, the no-spend challenge rules are the version with an end date.
Quitting as a count, not a vow
If one of the lines does come out as a no, the failure mode is predictable. You announce it, to yourself or to other people, and then the announcement does all the emotional work and nothing tracks whether it survived February.
The quit counter exists for exactly that gap. You pick from eight presets or write your own, set a quit date that can be backdated to when you actually stopped, and optionally add a daily cost so the money that has not been spent accumulates alongside the count. It runs live, down to the second, which is either motivating or slightly absurd depending on your mood.
The part I would pay attention to is how it handles a slip. Logging a slip is a different button from resetting the counter. A slip is recorded against the record and the count continues. A reset moves your quit date to today and starts the number again. Deciding which one you will use before you need it is the entire game, because in the moment you will reach for whichever option feels most like punishment.
That is the same principle as the never-miss-twice rule from how to stop quitting habits, and the same reason I show consistency in Loggd as a forgiving grid rather than a streak that resets to zero. A system that treats one bad day as total failure is a system that will be abandoned on the first bad day, and the data across thousands of tracked habits says the first bad day arrives early. In habits people quit fastest, around 45% of tracked habits were never checked off even once.
The four-minute version
- Pull three months of statements and count real frequencies, not remembered ones.
- Enter five to eight lines with your own prices. Ignore the presets.
- Read the yearly and five-year totals. Skip the twenty-year theatre.
- Mark each line worth it or not worth it, in writing.
- Take the biggest not-worth-it line and only that one, and put a count on it.
Everything on the worth-it list is now something you are buying on purpose, which is the actual point. The number was never the enemy. Not knowing it was.
Last updated: December 2026.
Written by Eusebiu, the solo founder building Loggd in public. I build the app in the evenings around contract work and a small daughter, which means my own version of this list has a suspiciously large coffee line that I have decided, after doing the arithmetic, to keep. I share what the aggregate data keeps showing on Threads.
Decided to drop one of them? Loggd tracks the days you kept it as a forgiving contribution grid, so a bad Tuesday in month three stays one lighter square instead of resetting you to zero. Start free.
