Hot Water Appliances

2026-07-23

I got my last job (the one before I launched a start up) around the time of the 2020 pandemic. I was really grateful to get a job right before the pandemic started and earnest and oddly I think the pandemic helped this company (Snapdocs a real estate document company) since there was a spike in digital notarization and the interest rates were super low. In the beginning on 2020 the interest rate was about 3.5% and in the beginning of 2021 it was 2.5%. Now it is hovering around 6.5%. I dont understand the macro economics of it, I do know it helped this company grow at a high rate and make a lot of revenue. I also made a lot of friends at the job (not just work friends but friend friends) and that was also nice.

Anyway I was grateful for a job, but since it was during COVID they were trying to keep people happy (which I also appreciated) and they would give you a stipend if you wanted to do something kind of health related. Mental health, physical health, etc. They were pretty lax with the rules, but I think once a quarter you could expense something that was in the realm of these two things. Yoga classes, gym membership, running shoes, smoothies, etc.

And so I double checked with my lovely wife Sneha and then I bought an espresso machine. Every quarter I would expense some part of it and after a few quarters it was free, the company had paid for the whole thing. And I think it was expensive (at least for me it was but probably not for coffee snobs) and overall it was $500 (here is a link: https://www.breville.com/en-us/product/bes500 ). And it was a big swing, I would not have bought it unless the company chipped it but I have used it almost every day since and I think it has paid itself off.

Lets say every day I make myself and my lovely wife Sneha a cup of coffee (365 days in a year) and it has been about 6 years since I got it. That is 2190 days, times two is 4380 cups of espresso. There are sometimes when we travel when we dont use the espresso machine, sometimes we have guests and then we make more than two cups of coffee in a day, so this is kind of ballpark not exact. But 4000 cups of espresso is a lot.

And I am not going to compare it to going out to Starbucks every day (lets say a cup of coffee at Starbucks is $4 times two, one for me and one for Sneha, is $32000) because that is silly. The alternative is not drinking Starbucks every day, the alternative is probably having drip coffee in a french press or instant coffee. So I wouldn’t say that the espresso machine saved me money, it probably didn’t in reality, in reality I probably spent more of fun beans and stuff, but it did make my morning a little bit nicer. How much nicer, it is hard to quantify with numbers but I think a bit nicer, and I think now I can look back and say it has been worth it.

And I say all of that just to say that I have also recently bought a hot water heater. I love kitchen gadgets that make my life more efficient. This is the one: https://store.zojirushi.com/products/cdlfc and it was about $200. And I use it every day, make myself green tea from Costco every work day, maybe two or three times a day. And right now, if the machine broke, it wouldn’t have been worth it. But slow, over years and years, it will pay itself off. As long as I keep using it. Hopefully in about six years from now, I can look back and think something similar, that I have used the machine every day and it was better than heating water on the stove every day two or three times a day.

-Gary