29th September 2026 - 5 min read
Every few years, someone with a lot of money tells young people they’d own a home too if they stopped buying coffee. Millennials heard it first. Gen Z swapped the flat white for a matcha latte and got told off for the same thing.
The oldest millennials are now in their 40s. The oldest Gen Z Malaysians are turning 29. Both groups have been hearing this since they started earning.
What Your Coffee Habit Costs In A Year
A coffee in Kuala Lumpur costs from RM9 at a local chain to RM17 at an independent café. Take RM12 as a mid-range cup, bought on working days only, because even the most committed coffee drinkers don’t pay café prices on a Sunday.
That works out to:
| Coffee habit | Cost |
| 1 coffee on a working day | RM12 |
| 22 working days | RM264/month |
| 12 months | RM3,168/year |
The latest median monthly salary for Malaysian employees was RM2,940 in 2025, according to DOSM’s Salaries and Wages Survey Report [PDF]. That puts the RM264 coffee habit at 9% of it, before tax and EPF.
Invest it at 5% instead and RM264 a month comes to about RM41,000 after 10 years. That rate is what ASM and ASB have paid recently. ASM paid 5% for the year to March 2026 and is open to any Malaysian when units are available, while ASB paid 5.75% for 2025 if you’re Bumiputera. Neither rate is promised. Distributions are declared once a year and can come in lower, and ASNB’s other fixed-price funds, ASM 2 Wawasan and ASM 3, both paid 4.75% for their most recent financial years.
RM41,000 is enough to buy an entry-level Perodua Bezza, with change left over for the insurance and the road tax.
The latest residential price data from the National Property Information Centre (NAPIC) puts the average house at RM507,533 in the first quarter of 2026, so a 10% deposit is RM50,753.
Against the coffee savings:
| Item | Value |
| Average house price | RM507,533 |
| 10% deposit | RM50,753 |
| Coffee savings per year | RM3,168 |
| Years to reach deposit, without investment returns | 16 years |
That’s 16 years of turning down every café latte and every airport flat white before a 7am flight. Invest it at 5% and it’ll take about 12 years instead, but prices will have risen by the time you get there.
RM507,533 is more than 14 times the median annual salary of RM35,280. And if you pay a 10% deposit, that leaves RM456,780 to borrow. At 4% a year over 35 years, that’s about RM2,025 a month, or 78% of the RM2,596 you’d take home on the median salary.
That RM2,596 is what’s left after EPF, SOCSO, and EIS. The EPF’s Belanjawanku 2024/2025 [PDF} guide estimates the minimum a single adult renting a room in the Klang Valley needs each month, with and without a car:
| Monthly expense | No car | With a car |
| Food | RM660 | RM660 |
| Housing (room rental) | RM400 | RM400 |
| Transportation | RM140 | RM840 |
| Ad hoc/One-off (clothing, car upkeep, and road tax) | RM90 | RM220 |
| Utility (electricity, water, and phone) | RM100 | RM100 |
| Personal care | RM90 | RM90 |
| Healthcare | RM30 | RM30 |
| Social participation (festivals, weddings, and birthdays) | RM180 | RM180 |
| Discretionary (parents, insurance, and travel) | RM130 | RM130 |
| Savings | RM150 | RM150 |
| Total | RM1,970 | RM2,800 |
| Left from RM2,596 take-home | RM626 | −RM204 |
Without a car there’s RM626 to spare, and the coffee is RM264 of it. With a car, the EPF’s own minimum budget runs RM204 past take-home. The car adds RM830 a month, more than three times what the coffee costs, and nobody gets lectured about that.
Pay did grow faster than prices in 2025. The median salary rose 5.3% that year, from RM2,793, while inflation for the year was 1.4%. But a 5.3% raise on the median works out to RM147 a month, which covers about half the coffee habit. Over a year that’s RM1,764, about 3.5% of a RM50,753 deposit.
The Belanjawanku estimate also assumes you owe nothing. AKPK had 53,000 people aged 30 and below on its debt management programme in March 2024, owing close to RM1.9 billion between them, about RM36,000 each. Repaying RM36,000 over five years amounts to RM600 a month, which is nearly all of the leftover RM626.
Every wedding has an auntie who asks the 26-year-old across the table, “Ah boy, when you want to buy house ah?” She’s assuming young people don’t save, and that whatever they earn goes on drinks, concerts, and Pokémon plushies.
Our Malaysian Financial Literacy Survey 2025 found the opposite. Only 11% of Gen Z Malaysians don’t save at all, the lowest of any generation surveyed. Millennials are at 18%, and Gen X, the generation most likely to be giving the advice, at 24%. Nearly nine in ten Gen Z respondents set something aside every month, and four in ten now save more than RM500, up from 36% the year before.
The 26-year-old she’s asking probably earns less than RM2,940, too. DOSM’s salary figures put the median for workers aged 25 to 29 at RM2,285 in 2025, RM655 below the all-ages median. On that pay, the RM264 coffee habit is 11.6% of the month’s pay.
Brew your own three days a week and your coffee bill drops from RM264 to about RM108 a month, and you keep two café mornings. Take the train instead of driving, and the RM840 a month for car transport becomes RM50 for a My50 pass.
Get a housemate or change your phone plan and you probably won’t need to touch the coffee at all. The 50/30/20 rule splits your take-home pay into 50% for needs like rent and food, 30% for things you enjoy, including your café mornings, and 20% for savings.
Put RM264 a month towards an emergency fund, and after three months you’d have about RM800, and after a year RM3,168. That covers an unexpected repair or clinic visit without reaching for a credit card.
Check the smaller expenses too. If food delivery or subscriptions have crept to RM500 a month without you noticing, start there. Go through one month of your card statements, and you’ll probably find RM200 to RM400 you’d forgotten about.
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As a creative content writer, Eloise has covered finance, business, lifestyle topics, and even moonlights as a singer-songwriter outside of RinggitPlus. Her current interests are learning the best ways to optimise spending and credit card hacks to gain more airline miles.
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