Personal finance types, myself included, often recommend making small lifestyle changes to save more money for retirement. A prominent example is the latte effect, which holds that cutting out a daily cup of coffee can theoretically save 1,000’s of dollars (it can). This kind of advice, however, really gets under some people’s skin.
Take Annie Lowrey for example, one of my favorite economic reporters from the NY Times, now working at NY Magazine alongside another of my favorites (on the political side), Jonathan Chait. Lowrey recently had a feature on Mr. Money Mustache, but before that she published a short critique of the latte effect advice typically dished out by personal finance gurus.