One Less Cigarette a Day Saves $91+ Per Year

By Pinyo, on August 11, 2007

I 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:

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Pinyo is the brain behind Moolanomy personal finance blog and a few other web sites. If you like this article, please subscribe for free daily email updates.

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7 Comments

Rose
August 12, 2007, 12:14

Wow that is a lot of savings.
Pinyo
August 12, 2007, 15:30

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!
Monica
August 14, 2007, 0:43

Well you should watch this video about a smoking experiment, maybe it helps you http://www.smoking-video.com
Pinyo
August 14, 2007, 4:09

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.
SingleGuyMoney
August 18, 2007, 21:17

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.
Pinyo
August 19, 2007, 9:13

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.
George
January 16, 2010, 23:31

Stumbled upon this article. Amazing facts? Eh… It’s always easy and fun to make fun of smokers like any minority you will get people behind you, but really the same could be said about many vices.
How much do you spend at the bar in a year? How much do you spend on candy or other non-healthy foods per year? Think of every single thing that leads to deaths that you are spending money on and stop doing it. Then you will be rich, healthy, and bored .

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