How I gave up Starbucks and bought a home

I was a late-in-life homeowner. It seemed like everyone I knew in my late 20s and 30s had already purchased a home. Truly we were the only renters in our kids’ circle of friends, a fact I heard more than once after Max would come home from a playdate, “why don’t we have an upstairs?”

I didn’t go a day without thinking about it: scrolling Redfin obsessively, watching HGTV every evening. I craved home ownership without knowing why, but that I needed it. Turned out it was actually the values I wanted that I thought only came from home ownership: Community, Security, Belonging, Craftsmanship.

How to At Home

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June 19, 2025

We all know that it’s important to have values. They can be your personal or family tenets, your creative why, or your authentic code. They help us live our lives in a way that feels genuine to us, assist us when we have a tough decision to make, and give us something to count on when life is challenging. I wrote about my business and personal values in a

But home ownership felt far away. I wasn’t sure how we could save the required amount for a down payment. It all seemed out of reach. But what ended up moving the needle was awareness: I truly looked at what we were spending our money on, something I’d never really done before my late 30s. I’d never been very consistent with budgeting before this stage, spending what I had on what I needed at the time. However, if the goal of home ownership was so important to us, why weren’t our money habits reflecting this? So I took a very detailed look at what was coming out of our bank account for three months, from our Andersonville rental, categorizing each dollar spent.

Turned out the biggest place we were spending on our family of four was going out to eat and most notably, coffee.

Keep reading to learn how much I was spending on coffee per month, and how changing this one daily habit allowed me to save for my first home. You can find my home line here, and stay up to date over on instagram.