How Much Does it Cost to Be an Alcoholic?
My addiction completely drained my bank account.
Money has been one of the single biggest sources of stress of my entire life. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that way.
Within a year of graduating college, I was already thousands of dollars in debt. I managed to pay it off but continued to just barely scrape by throughout my twenties. It wasn’t until my early thirties that I started building any type of savings.
There are a lot of reasons that I struggled so much with money, including many external factors that were outside of my control. For example, I graduated in December of 2008, exactly when the world entered the greatest recession of my lifetime.
However, out of all of the factors that affected my finances, the ones with the largest impacts were my addictions to alcohol and cigarettes.
I began experimenting with alcohol and cigarettes when I was in high school, but it was during my undergrad years that both habits turned into bona fide addictions. When I finished college, I was drinking every night and going through a pack of cigarettes every day. These addictions stuck with me for the next decade of my life.
How much does it cost to fuel addictions like that? The short answer is a lot. The longer answer is that it really depends on where you live and exactly how much of these substances you’re going through.
I went to college in Florida and afterward moved back to my home state of North Carolina. Both of these states have incredibly cheap cigarettes. I think they were around $3 or so per pack when I started smoking, and about twice that by the time I quit.
However, a couple of years after moving back to NC, I headed to Chicago. There, cigarettes were far more expensive. I lived in Chicago for about 5 years, and sometimes spent as much as $15 for my daily pack of smokes. That’s nearly $5500 a year.
The cost of my drinking habit was even more variable. When I was in my early twenties, I mostly drank Bud Light, which is on the cheaper end of the spectrum, but also has a lower alcohol content—which meant I drank much more of it. I don’t remember how much it cost at the time, but a quick Google search says that a pack of 12 cans now costs about $12.
As I got a little older, I switched to fancy craft beers. I especially loved IPAs. These were more expensive than Bud Light but also had more alcohol per drink, so I didn’t always buy quite as much.
From what I remember, I typically ended up spending about $10 to $15 a day on my drinking habit. When money was especially tight, I’d turn to cheaper drinks to cut the cost down a bit, but I don’t think I ever could have been spending less than $5 a day.
How much did all of this add up to? The truth is that back when I was drinking and smoking, I was scared to ever calculate it. A very conservative guess would be that I was spending $10 a day on alcohol and $10 a day on cigarettes, which would add up to about $600 a month. Sadly, I think in reality it was probably closer to $1000, based on how high my old credit card statements used to be.
It’s truly insane that I used to spend this much money on my addictions. I didn’t have enough money to be doing this, and as a result, I ended up either putting the expenses on my credit card or cutting costs in other, more important areas of my life.
Over the lifetime of my drinking habit, I spent tens of thousands of dollars on alcohol. When we add in the money I spent on cigarettes, that number likely breaks the hundred thousand dollar mark.
I can only imagine how much better my finances would have been if I had been investing that much money during my twenties instead of blowing it on booze.
It’s easy to think about all of the money that I wasted on my addictions and feel overwhelmed with regret, but that’s a productive mindset. I can’t change the past, so there’s no use beating myself up over it.
Instead, I prefer to look at the positive side of this equation, which is that by getting sober I’ve saved thousands upon thousands of dollars.
I’ve been sober for about 8 years, and by my estimation, I would have spent at least $30,000 on alcohol if I had kept drinking during that time. I’ve also been cigarette-free for the past 5 years, which is another $18,000 saved.
I can see these savings reflected in my life. I was able to pay off my car loan, open an IRA, and—for the first time in my adult life—begin to travel a bit.
These are things that would have never been possible if I kept dumping all my money into my addictions.
One of the best things about these savings is that I could see the difference almost immediately after I quit drinking. Many of sobriety’s benefits take years to manifest, but even a single day without alcohol already adds $10 to your pocket.
For anyone who has recently quit drinking, I’d encourage you to spend some time looking at how much you were spending on alcohol. It can be quite painful to think about, but it can also provide powerful motivation to stay quit.