Roughly speaking, my life is divided into two parts: there is the almost 37 years that I had never heard of the term ‘latte factor’, and the period after, which now lasts a few days. A series of savings tips appeared on the NOS site on Saturday under the headline ‘Life is becoming more expensive, poverty is increasing’. The word “latte factor” refers to the phenomenon that you can save a lot of money if you just drink a tub of cheap filter coffee every day, instead of constantly buying expensive takeaway coffees.
According to Google, this sad neologism arises in the two-tier country between people who really want to get rich and buy expensive books full of money-saving tips for it, and people who are already rich and get richer by selling saving tips to others. More precisely, in the mind of financial expert and writer David Bach (founder of FinishRich.com).
The savings tips that the NOS came up with varied quite a bit, from the obvious ‘cliques instead of ordering’, to the eccentric ‘keep driving behind a truck on the highway’ and the well-made ‘cancel your forgotten underpants subscription’. .
In the use of Bach’s term ‘latte factor’, the widespread misunderstanding that wealth is a choice (and therefore poverty too) clashes head on with the reality that the CPB presented last week with graphs and predictions that made no one happy. The largest post-war purchasing power contraction, in a country where one million people already live below the poverty line. I remembered the report that news hour last year made about some of the 200,000 working poor in the Netherlands. People who work more than forty hours a week, take on all kinds of work, mothers who jump from temporary employment to flex contract and, once at home, have to choose which child can go to a sports club and which cannot.
You would say: why don’t those people just cancel their underwear subscription? Are they suddenly worried? But hey, how does that work, you have a subscription, and you always say it too late and then you’re stuck with it for another three years and meanwhile the underpants just keep coming, more underpants than you can ever get dirty, and there then float, below the subsistence level, on a sea of clean underwear.
Also on latte-factor Saturday, this newspaper published the annual survey of top incomes. And although it is constantly emphasized everywhere that last week’s financial bad news conversation concerned everyone in the Netherlands, that is of course not true. Most top drivers can safely stay out of the slipstream of big trucks for a while; the pay gap is widening faster than ten thousand subscribers can fill it with superfluous underpants.
Fundamental choices, such as sparing profits and assets in this cabinet’s tax legislation, choices in favor of those who have already taken so much of the pie, are skilfully hidden from view by worried faces, by a lacks weightless concepts such as ‘recognizing’ and ‘instruments’ and ‘poignant’. The words of compassion and understanding are always readily available for the growing group of people for whom the energy bill is or will become an unsurmountable hurdle, but the generosity in deeds is still flowing freely in the other direction, towards the great hope.