Find out how much smoking really costs you

I think it is safe to say that everyone knows smoking is an expensive habit. Besides the increased use of cost of health care for smokers the amount spent on cigarettes over a lifetime can be mind-numbing, especially with prices on the rise. Thankfully if you need to really see how much that nicotine addiction is costing you; you can use a free Windows tool called CostofSmoking to find out your current smoking tab.

While there are already more online calculators out there to help you figure out the cost of smoking, none of them offer the range of options that CostofSmoking does. This program takes increases in cost as well as future savings and inflation rates into calculating the cost of smoking. You can also set up multiple periods to account for any times in the past where you did quit, to get a more accurate total cost of smoking.

While we all have our vices and weaknesses when it comes to budgeting and saving, I don't see how anyone can be a smoker and still complain about not having enough money. Even though the estimation of my video game habits adds up to an awakening $10,000 over the course of 10 years, it still doesn't touch the out of pocket cost of $89,000 a smoker would spend on his addiction over a 20 year period, 10 years past and another 10 into the future. If you invested in a savings account over the same 20 year period you'd be looking at savings of at least $120,000 in money not spent on butts.

If this tool doesn't convince you that smoking is a fiscally irresponsible activity, then you must be pretty well off!