Are You Smarter Than A Smoker?

A pack a day smoker spends $1825 annually on cigarettes (according to this calculator @ $5 per pack). I’ve got plenty of friends who like to make fun of smokers for wasting their money on cigarettes yet they’re putting nothing away for their retirement. Clearly the smoker has made a choice to waste their money on cigarettes, but my non-smoking friends are simply making less obvious decisions to spend their money in other ways instead of putting the money into savings.

Whether it’s the Marlboro factor or the latte factor (or heaven forbid, both) it’s easy to fall into bad financial habits which do nothing to advance our long term goals. And it’s not enough to just break those habits (as hard as it might be)  you have to start a new habit of actually saving and investing the savings.

Creating a new habit is hard, but you can help yourself by setting up an automatic transfer to savings. If you were to transfer $150 per month to savings each month you remove the money you would have spent on <insert vice here> from your available pool.