The Wednesday Morning Weekly — September 25, 2024
I don’t personally own a Keurig but I do occasionally get free cups of coffee made by them when I visit my local credit union. I do appreciate the convenience of them for a quick cup of coffee. Discard the old K cup, pop in the new K cup, put the cup under and press start — done!
The K cups are quite pricey though and really adds up to a lot over the year. Also I personally find that the K cup coffee doesn’t taste any better than the instant coffee we buy at Walmart.
So I had this idea I shared with a good friend of mine who owns a Keurig, who buys K cups. In this article I share what he thought of it and some photos he snapped for this article. This perhaps saves one over $500 per year and doesn’t sacrifice any quality of life / convenience.
So I had this idea of using the Keurig coffee maker to make a cup of instant coffee. Just put the teaspoon of coffee in the cup, put the cup under the Keurig and press start, with no K cup installed. So the stream of hot water goes directly into the cup. I asked my friend if this was possible and he said yes it was, that you can simply leave the K cup out and press start and it just works!
So, as a gift I purchased some Nescafé Taster’s Choice instant coffee for my friend to try out with his Keurig. He obliged and snapped some photos for me for this article, sharing his opinion as well.
So here we have the cup with the instant coffee in place, ready to go.
So put the above cup under the Keurig and press start, and the stream of hot water comes out — super simple!
A moment later it is done! My friend says he can’t tell the difference in taste between the instant coffee and the K cups. He drinks his coffee with half & half, same as how I drink my coffee.
Cost Analysis. Say one drinks four cups of coffee per day made with a Keurig. For simplicity let’s just say the K cups were the typical price of 50 cents per K cup. This amounts to two dollars per day. Two dollars per day times 365 days is $730 annually — which is quite pricey indeed. Contrast with Nescafé Taster’s Choice coffee at 10 cents per cup. This is one fifth the cost. Four cups of instant coffee per day is 40 cents. Annually this is $146, like one fifth the cost of K cups and just as easy to make using the Keurig machine. $730 – $146 = $584 dollars saved annually and is still just as convenient in my opinion.
Further savings. If you aren’t picky, you could even go with Great Value instant coffee which comes out to be about 5 cents per cup, half of the price of the Nescafé Taster’s Choice instant. Which would then be 1/10th the cost of K cups.
Or you could switch to black tea for further savings like we did, but I know that’s a big change and not for everyone! 😸
Other Benefits. No microplastics exposure and better for the environment!
A fun little comparison to Starbucks. A friend of mine used to manage a Starbucks and said the average customer would spend $10 per day there between coffee and a cookie or whatever. She said she often saw them there every single work day. This is $50 per work week. Times 52 weeks this is $2600 annually on coffee/cookies! Contrast to 40 cents per day for four cups of coffee made with expensive instant: again $146 annually. $146 vs $2600! Imagine $2400 per year invested for 30 years instead. This amounts to $190K saved for retirement by just drinking homemade coffee.
Summarizing. This is just one little hack to perhaps save one over $500 per year, among dozens of others. Individually they might not seem like a big deal. However, altogether they can add up to save tens of thousands of dollars per year! — all without sacrificing any quality of life. For more ideas see my other articles under the Frugality category on this blog; I’ll be adding more and more over time.
You can also buy off-brand reusable K-cups for a few bucks each on Amazon (just search “reusable k cups). You can then fill it with favorite ground coffee and run it through the Keurig.
Very cool db, thank you. Have you done any cost analysis of this option? Do you load up say a dozen of them every few days? A bit more work than say throw away K cups or instant coffee, but worth it I imagine under the right circumstances.
I haven’t run the cost, but I second the reusable K Cups. I bought two of the reusable pods and ran them each day for two cups of coffee. Empty, rinse, and lay out to dry until the next day. I’m now in a cold brew phase though. So, they’re put away right now. But I might go back to these in the winter. (Note: I recommend the metal reusable K Cups over the plastic ones, if you explore this option!) My husband refuses to use them and continues to drink his K Cup coffee each morning from a standard K Cup. But at least I felt better about the bottom line AND the environment when I was using them for my coffee.
Here’s a quick and dirty analysis using fairly conservative numbers:
4-pack of Reusable K-Cups on Amazon = $8-10
Typical 12oz bag of ground coffee = $8-10
Cups brewed per 12oz bag = 20-25
Not factoring in the cost of K-cup, you’re paying $0.30-$0.40 per brew (price of coffee divided by cups brewed)
For the sake of this analysis, let’s say you save $0.10 per brew compared to a K-Cup and you’re trying to recoup the $10 of reusable cup costs. You would need to brew 100 cups, which would only take 25 days based on your assumption of drinking 4 cups per day. After that, you will theoretically be ahead on cost since the reusable K-cups last a very long time. The downside is you need to pack the pods and clean them out each time (1-2 min), but I won’t count the additional labor here.
All of this assumes you’re buying moderately priced Starbucks at the supermarket, but you can shave more cost if you buy bulk coffee at Costco or drink an off-brand coffee
2 further options, the first is obvious.
#1: just use a cheap drip machine that costs ~$25. We drink bulk brand (Maxwell House, Kroger, etc.) from 29 oz. containers; each one lasts my wife and I about a month, at a “12 cup” pot of coffee/day. Last time I bought one it was $7-$8, though now it runs ~$10, which means we usually spend $90-$120 on homemade coffee/year. We might be drinking it slightly less than full blast, but it’s definitely not weak.
#2: in Korea, K cups are still far behind instant coffee packets. Just pour it into the cup and add hot water. You can buy Korean and US brand packets in bulk on Amazon for $.17 – $.25 cents each. If you don’t want the hassle of cleaning anything, these are a great option.