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When you quit smoking, you’re constantly looking for reasons to back up your decision to quit. The nicodevil is constantly whispering into your ear: “Just one won’t hurt. Go on. Have a smoke. You’ve done well so far – you’ve earned one”

Here are some good reasons to ignore him. Pick the situation you’re happier with.

Cigarettes cost essentially $5 a pack. OK, sometimes you get 2 for 1 and you feel like you’ve cheated Big Tobacco out of a pack. Other times, you’re so desperate for a smoke that you’ll pay $7.50 for a pack of a brand you don’t even like from an airport vendor – or a vending machine.

Even though most people don’t admit it – they smoke a pack a day. That’s why Big Tobacco sells them in packets of 20. It’s a daily ration. A few in the morning, a couple after lunch, then the rest in the evening. Leave yourself one or two to have just before you brush your teeth in the morning – then you buy another pack on the way to work the next morning. Simple.

Pack a day. $5 a day. $35 a week. $150 a month. $1800 a year.

Horrible, isn’t it? And, assuming you’re employed and are paying about 30% of your gross paycheck in deductions, you need to actually earn $2571.43 to pay for that.

That’s a thought that makes my rubber chickens get back on their roosts pretty quickly, that’s for sure.

Just for argument’s sake, let’s say a fictional person (who may or may not be actually writing this article) started smoking when he was 15 and has been smoking off and on for 20 years. Forget all the ‘off’ bits for a minute. Let’s see what that $5 per day would have looked like had it been put into a savings account every month, and left to grow at a (very conservative) 5.0% …

$61,912.00

Shudder. That’s $150 a month, at a savings rate of 5.0% (you could probably do a lot better than that), compounded monthly.

If that’s not depressing enough, let’s imagine that the same $5 per day ($150 per month) is invested in the market for 40 years and earns 11% (an often quoted long term figure for market returns … check out the S&P 500 average since 1970, for example):

Yep – you guessed it – over a million dollars.

$1,108,693.00

… to be precise.

Now, if that’s not reason enough to quit smoking, to stay quit or (if you’re reading this and don’t smoke) not start in the first place … I don’t know what is.