In my investment classes, I tell my students that any woman can become an investor—and in the process put herself on the road to financial security—simply by putting aside as little as $50 a month. Invariably, someone in the audience will raise her hand at this point and say, “David, I’m living paycheck to paycheck. I’m in debt, and I’m barely making it. I don’t have this $50 a month you keep talking about.”

One day I challenged just such a young woman on her assertion that she didn’t have enough money to invest. Deborah was 23 years old and worked at an advertising agency. She wasn’t being paid a whole lot, and she insisted there was no way she possibly could put $50 a month into her retirement plan at work. As she put it, she was “dead broke and destitute.” So I asked her to take me through her average day.

“Well,” she began, “I go to work and then I research—“

“Do you start your day with coffee?” I interrupted her.

A friend of Deborah’s who was sitting next to her started to laugh. “Deborah without coffee in the morning is not a good thing,” she said.