One Less Cigarette a Day Saves $91+ Per Year
By Pinyo • Aug 11th, 2007 • Category: Personal FinanceI am not a smoker, but a couple of my friends are. Some of them occasionally complain about money problem to me, so I was wondering what their smoking habit is costing them. I am not going to ask any of them to stop, but I hope this post will help them move in the right direction.
My first step was to figure out what a pack of cigarette costs. I went to a grocery store in my neighborhood and the cashier told me it is $6.75 a pack. I was shocked — that is expensive. I am not going to assume that this is what my friends paid, so I will use a more conservative $5 a pack (or 25 cents a cigarette).
If a smoker can reduce his consumption by just 1 cigarette per day, that translates into $91.25 year. Most of my smoking friends smoke about half a pack a day — that’s over $900 a year!
Here are some cool factoids:
- Invest $900 a year at 10% and you have over $160,000 in 30 years
- Life insurance costs more than twice as much for smokers versus non-smoker. I checked BudgetLife.com and compared $500,000 20 years term life policy for a 33 years old — non-smokers pay any where from $260 to $580 versus $1,380 for smokers.
- Smokers pay about $40 more a month for medical insurance.
- Smokers’ home are 35% more likely to catch fire and pay about 10% more for home insurance.
- Smoking in your car can dramatically drop its resale value.
- Smokers hit the bucket about 10 years quicker.
I hope you enjoyed this short Saturday afternoon post. Tomorrow is the weekly roundup, I collected some really good posts from around the web so please do come back.
Updated: Here is a public service link to a video at Smoking Video:












Wow that is a lot of savings.
Rose - welcome to Moolanomy. Well, small things do add up. I think by the time I get to saving idea #10, it would be in the thousand range by then. Stay tuned!
Well you should watch this video about a smoking experiment, maybe it helps you http://www.smoking-video.com
Monica - welcome to Moolanomy. That’s pretty scary, and I also have seen even scarier photos and videos. Thank you for sharing. I hope it will raise awareness about harms caused by cigarette.
I live in GA and am a smoker. I pay on avg about $3 bucks a pack. If cigs went up to $6.25, that would certainly encourage me to quit.
SingleGuyMoney - yeah, things are a bit more expensive here in NYC. But there are other good reasons to quit smoking beside price. Anyway, it’s not my place to tell you to quit.