I understand what they're saying but I don't trust their math when they claim "simply cutting cable TV and a few lattes would instantly boost their savings to 15%." That implies that cable TV and a few lattes accounts for $2.5k of spending in a year.
$100/mo cable, 5 lattes/week before work at $5/latte… it’s not so far off (unless you decide to litigate the definition of “few” or the average post-tax price of coffee in Nebraska or whatever). It’s illustrative.
Do people still have $100/month cable plans that don't come bundled with Internet? Also, 5 lattes/week is more than a few lattes and $5 per latte is extremely expensive.
Feel free to plug in different numbers of course, preferably numbers from your own life. The point of the article is not to get you pondering about the finances of this hypothetical family and how much they may or may not spend on cable and coffee, but to get you thinking about your own finances in the same way.
The thesis of that article is that early retirement is simple formula and isn't as complex as people make it out to be. When one of the examples they give to explain that claim is to just get rid of cable and a few lattes it makes me think that they don't actually know what they're talking about.
Firstly, very few people still have cable. Also, I don't know anyone who's spending $1200+ per year on coffee (and, $1200 per year is a lot more than just a "few lattes").
I actually somewhat agree with their formula but I don't like how they put it in a condescending way. It's like claiming that losing weight is as simple as having more calories out than calories in. Functionally that's true but it doesn't really help much.
It's not an exciting way where you get to be in the newspapers as the latest billionaire, but it does work and has very low variance.