Dear Mr. Bach,

I recently read your book The Automatic Millionaire. As a result, I decided to take your Latte Factor challenge. As I kept track of the week’s spending, I found that the worst single area of wasted money was soda pop bought at work. I found that I put $21.00 into the soda machines each week. When I multiplied this figure by 52 weeks I was shocked! It figured out to be $1092 being put into the soda machines each year. This was nearly 5% of my take home salary going into the soda machines! Needless to say, change needed to be made. While I did not totally abandon the soda pop, I started to simply bring a 24-pack of cans to work each week. The difference in price between the bottles and cans was nearly $900! That’s close to ¼ of 2006’s Roth IRA limits, or nearly $29,000 by the time I retire in 2040 (10% interest rate). I never thought the price tag of twisting a few plastic bottle caps would be so expensive! Thank you for opening my eyes Mr. Bach!

Douglas Lee
Mission, SD