About the calculator

We collect the number of cigarettes you smoke and assume you invest the money you don't spend on them (the default return on investment (ROI) is set to 4%, feel free to change it). As is often the case, people greatly underestimate the power of compound interest.

Let's take a typical scenario: a pack of Marlboros costs $6.50, John smokes 20 cigarettes per day. He's 25 years old and wonders: what could I buy at 55 if I quit now and saved that cash? The plain, uninvested money alone gives a pretty nice sum: over $71,000. But when invested at 4% per annum, it provides an additional $66k for a total amount of $137,000! That's 137,000 reasons to quit smoking now!

Where exactly did the 4% ROI come from? Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the globe, shared his predictions on the average return from stocks in a Bloomberg article. He estimates the return at a level of 7%. This number is also consistent with historical data. After taking inflation of approximately 3% into account, we get a 4% ROI that we use in this Quit Smoking and Save Calculator.

An additional problem to keep in mind is that the prices of cigarettes increase every year due to new taxes imposed by governments trying to tackle the problem. The trend is simple - if you keep smoking the same amount of cigarettes for years to come, it will only cost you more.