The Ten Year Return Of A Bacon Butty

Some of my lovely friends gave me a Gregg’s gift card for my birthday. I’m not a regular visitor to Gregg’s, but I think their bacon butties are some of the best out there (when served with brown sauce, naturally!).

 

When we’re off on holiday in the car we like to make an early start, and Gregg’s makes a quick and relatively cheap breakfast stop, particularly when we can combine it with a brief charging stop for the car. So the magic Gregg’s card came in very handy when we were en route to Scotland recently - thanks guys.

 

When visiting Gregg’s at around 8am I noticed that many of their clientele were workmen, guys arriving in white vans and wearing high viz bibs. It was clearly their regular morning routine on the way to work.

 

This sounds a lovely way to start each day, but I reckon the cost could sneak up on you. A bacon sandwich at the store I was in was £2.75, or £3.70 for the larger baguette. An extra 25p gets you an additional item - eg making it bacon and sausage. Then there’s the upsell to include a coffee - you get the idea.

 

Most of these guys were getting the larger baguette with a coffee, and spending £4.55. If that’s a daily routine, I wondered how the cost was going to add up.

 

£4.55 x 19 work days per month (allowing for bank holidays and annual leave) = £86.45 per month.

 

I plugged this into my favourite compound interest calculator to see what the long-term effect of this would be - what would the same money grow to, if saved and invested in a pension instead, over say ten years. I assumed 10% annual growth, which is what the stock market tends to do, roughly.

 

It came to £22,320.

 

I’m a little bit gobsmacked at this figure. That’s pretty close to the entire retirement pot of a typical retiree. People will say that they don’t have enough income to be able to save, but this brings it home how a little change could add up. And this is just over ten years - over a normal working lifetime from age 20 to 60, it would be £689,074.

 

You only have to save the equivalent of a Gregg’s breakfast each working day in order to retire wealthy.

 

If you wanted to apply this “ten year equivalent” to your own habits, you don’t even have to fire up a compound interest calculator. I’ve done it for you. For any regular working day spend, times it by 1290. So if you spend £1 on a can of Pepsi each day you go to work, the ten year return in a pension would be £1,290.

 

If it’s a monthly spend, times it by 258.

 

If it’s a daily spend every day of the year, times it by 7,853.

 

Some FIRE bloggers do tend to get a bit "hair shirt" about things, but we really do need to make some savings in order to feed our investing project. No disrespect to Gregg’s - you do a lovely bacon butty. And to be fair, breakfast at home wouldn’t be zero cost. But I’m sticking with porridge at home most of the time and clamping down on any regular treat brekkie tendencies.