Your daily coffee, invested — what's it worth?
Enter your daily coffee spend and see what it could have grown to if invested in the S&P 500 monthly — using real data back to 1990.
$5 × 1 cup/day × 20 yr of coffee
$36,525
Invested in the S&P 500 each month instead, it'd be $164,862 (4.51×)
Swap in your own coffee spend to try it.
How it works
Enter your daily coffee cost and number of cups. The calculator converts that into a monthly contribution (daily cost × cups × 30.44 days). It then simulates investing that amount each month into the S&P 500 at the actual index level for that month.
The underlying data is the S&P 500 total-return (TR) monthly index published by Professor Robert Shiller starting January 1990. The TR index includes reinvested dividends, making it a closer approximation of real long-term investing returns than a simple price index.
All calculations are pre-tax and pre-fee hypothetical simulations. Actual investment returns will differ. The starting month of the backtest window has a large effect on the outcome — experiment with the period slider to explore different scenarios.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the data come from?
- We use the S&P 500 total-return (TR) monthly index published by Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University. The dataset is available under the PDDL-1.0 open license.
- Why the S&P 500?
- The S&P 500 has the longest publicly available monthly return series for a major index, making it ideal for long-term dollar-cost-averaging simulations. The TR index includes reinvested dividends, which gives a more realistic picture of long-term compounding than a simple price index.
- Why are taxes and fees not included?
- Actual investing costs vary widely by account type (e.g., 401(k), Roth IRA, taxable brokerage), broker, and country of residence. Including them would require assumptions that may not apply to you. This calculator shows the gross return of the underlying index as a baseline.
- Is this investment advice?
- No. This is a hypothetical simulation of what past S&P 500 performance implies for a given contribution schedule. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and this result should not be used to make investment decisions.