Quitting Cigarettes For Good

Have you ever wondered which industries are recession proof? Health care along with food have always been considered to be recession proof. Whether Joe Public has a bank balance or not, he needs to eat or go to the doctor if he falls sick. Let me add one more industry to that list. Cigarettes and tobacco products. The simple fact is that those who smoke cannot do without cigarettes and tobacco. A smoker is going to buy his cigarettes, no matter what his present financial situation.

In these times of severe recession, it is necessary for you to look at how much you are spending on cigarettes every week and seriously consider whether you can justify that unnecessary expense.  You may not be committed to quit simply because you, like many other smokers, have read all the articles about the effects smoking has on your health. I know many smokers who constantly read about smoking and then light up. For the last almost 35 years, cigarette packs have carried health warnings, with little effect on smokers. I do not see any smoker even reading those warnings. But doing the sums on how much it costs you every year may open your eyes and induce you to take some positive action.

Cigarettes, at the moment, cost at least $5 a pack or even more depending on where you live. Most states as well as the federal government have slapped on very high taxes to do both – discourage smoking as well as collect additional revenue.  If you smoke between one and two packs a day, your minimum annual expense on smoking would be around $1800 a year. Yes – $1800 going up in smoke every year. There are also other costs that smokers generally do not consider. For example, smokers pay higher premiums for health and life insurance. If you are diagnosed with a serious condition and have to be hospitalised, you will have even more expenses and loss of earnings. Now calculate all the money you have spent in the last 5 or 10 years that you have been smoking and the total figure may very well shock you.

Governments around the world, especially those that provide free health care, have concluded that smokers are just too costly to treat when hospitalised and their health care budgets would be much better off with fewer smokers. Cancer and heart disease are expensive to treat and many governments are now spending more of their budgets in getting smokers off their habit.

Think about it and make concrete plans to quit.

Zeke

Tags: kicking smoking, Quit Smoking, quitting cigarettes, smoking habit, stop smoking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Health and Fitness, Quit Smoking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.