Shutterstock
You know by now that there are dozens of reasons to quit smoking. It’s better for your health, for one. Quitting will make your clothes stop smelling like an ashtray. You’ll clean up your space a ton by not having ashtrays and cigarette butts around. After you quit, you’re likely to feel better and have more energy. None of this is news to you.
Here’s another reason to consider quitting that you might not have thought about yet, though: when you quit, you’re probably going to save a lot of money.
Smoking cigarettes is extremely expensive. Let’s just start with the cost of a pack of cigarettes, which we’ll assume is $7 (the national average) for the sake of this illustration. Assuming you smoke one pack per week, every week, we can say you’re spending $364 per year on cigarettes alone. But that’s not the whole story.
How often do you need to buy new clothes when cigarette embers burn holes in them? How many times have you had to call out of work because you’re sick with bronchitis or a similar illness? Here’s the scary one: What does treatment for lung cancer, gum cancer, or throat cancer cost? You can see how the price of a pack of smokes is the least of your worries when you’re considering the purely financial impact of smoking.
It doesn’t matter if you’re 24 or 74; quitting smoking now is going to save you money. The day you quit, you’ll naturally stop spending money on packs of cigarettes and lighters. The deeper savings, however, lie in your medical bills. The sooner you quit, the less likely it is that the amount you’ve smoked so far will develop into serious illness.
Quitting can be free if you’re able to stop cold turkey. But even if you aren’t, using smoking cessation aids is well worth their cost. There are plentiful types of quit smoking aids that work (really!), plus testimonials from former smokers that attest to the usefulness of these products.
Considering that most aids like nicotine gum, patches, and similar products will cost you a similar amount to your former smoking habit, it’s easy to see why this is a financially sound call. You’re replacing a chronic habit with a short-term smoking cessation aid that could also keep you out of the hospital. The real kicker? People who don’t smoke tend to live longer, and those are more years you could be spending with your family. That alone is priceless.
