And by cheap ass I of course mean me. I’ve read frugal blogs that talk about saving $2000 a year by giving up Starbucks and all that other crap you’re tired of. That isn’t interesting to me because I spend maybe $50 a year at Starbucks and its competitors.

Here’s my inspiration for this post:

My boss was breaking down our annual raise into terms we could understand better, cups of coffee. It worked out to a fraction of a cup of Starbucks coffee, per day.

But it reminded me of an old hobby of breaking down minor expenses into their per-use cost. Since my usual coffee intake is from off-brand instant, I knew my raise would look better in those terms. There are only two factors in the cost of my coffee.

• Instant Coffee
• Hot Water

This is a choice I made a long time ago for health reasons. Adding cream and sugar takes away from the healthiness of coffee. In unsweetened form, it’s a no-calorie beverage that is warming and stimulating. But holding those ingredients also saves me money. If you can’t handle black coffee, it’s not because you’re weak, it’s because you’re putting in too much coffee to start. Start with a little, and work your way up.

The coffee is an off-brand instant variety, my most recent version is from Wal-Mart. It cost me $4. One rounded teaspoon is all that is needed for adequate flavor. According to the USDA, one rounded teaspoon of instant coffee weighs about 1.8 grams. My instant coffee container is 226.8 grams. This means I have about 126 cups of coffee in the container and my per use expense of coffee is $0.032, or 3.2¢.

My water source is a water cooler at work. You’d think the tallest and newest office building in the city would have better water, but we don’t, we import it. My group shares the cost of the cooler (which also does hot water). Including the rental fee, my cut of the water bill costs about $3 a month. I drink about 4 cups of that water a day (including coffee), which makes each cup cost me 3.4 cents. For those of you playing the home game, a standard month for me has 22 work-days. $3 / 22 days / 4 cups a day = 3.4¢.

And now for the complicated math:

3.2¢ for coffee + 3.4¢ for water = 6.6¢ per cup of coffee.

Can you believe I did that without a calculator? It’s no wonder I’m so smart. If you want to figure out how much your coffee costs you and you have sugar or cream be sure to look up those facts and figure out how much those cost per serving or unit.

The greatest thing I learn from these exercises is exactly how much it costs me to be nice. When someone wants some of my coffee, I know it will set me back 3.2¢ for a teaspoon. The lesson then is to charge a nickel, and make a profit. Cheap ass indeed.