Articles giving tips on living frugally and sustainably
Don’t Set Your Cash On Fire
February 28, 2014
Controlling or at least limiting your vices can not only help you live a much longer and healthier life, it will likely make you much, much richer. (I don’t mean to preach, and I strongly believe in personal liberty). Perhaps the one to really try to avoid is smoking, or if you do smoke, I wish you best of luck if you decide to quit. Yes, tobacco is one of the most addictive substances you will come across in everyday life, and so quitting can be incredibly hard to do. In smoking your are literally burning money away, while at the same time massively increasing your risk of a whole host of diseases, particularly cancer and heart disease as well as having an increased stroke risk or other nasty diseases.
Enough about the medical side of things, let’s look at the financial aspects, which will hopefully help provide some motivation to stop: For simplicity’s sake, let’s say it’s $5 even for a pack of 20, and let’s also say you are a light smoker, and smoke 5 a day, which adds to $456.25 in expenses a year, which does’t sound like all that much. However, if you saved the money instead and got an average of 8% savings, this adds to $6,951.95 in 10 years, $22,382.78 for 20 years, $56,633.66 for 30 and a rather large $132,728.12 for 40 years. Those numbers were for a more unusual smoker, what happens if its around the average of a pack a day? That’s $1825 in 1 year, and at the same 8% average yearly interest as calculated earlier, quitting and saving the money will give you $27,822.98 in 10 years. After 20 it’s $89,579.99, after 30 years it is $226,658.34 and after 40 years it is $530,922.94. No kidding, half a million bucks, man that is a lot of money! (Yes, I am not counting for inflation lessing the affect of savings, however inflation will also drive up the cost of the cigarettes, so the actual amounts of savings will be greater too).
Of course, we haven’t yet touched upon the potential health care savings…….
