As a teenager, I remember seeing a commercial that showed a smoker blowing up a Porsche 911 cabriolet as a high-impact visualization of the opportunity cost of smoking from an economic point of view. What a bunch of hog wash. They should have blown up a few more Porsches to make it realistic.
According to the Smoking and Health Action Foundation, the average carton of cigarettes costs between $70.18 and $106.09, depending on the province or territory you live in. If we average those extremes, we end up with a cost approaching 45 cents per cigarette, since a carton contains 200 cigarettes.
I'll make some simple assumptions for my own high-impact analysis: Our smoker starts smoking a pack a day at 15, pays $9 for a pack, and the long-term, after-inflation rate of return of a moderately aggressive portfolio that they could have directed their money to is 3 per cent. That works out to more than $375,000 of opportunity cost in today's dollars by the time he or she reaches 65.
If you want to play with the variables, you can download a copy of the cost of smoking calculator here. If you want to figure out the value with today's purchasing power of a dollar, just subtract an estimate of the long-term inflation rate from the portfolio's annualized rate of return.
But even this analysis is too simple. What other costs do you incur as a smoker that you wouldn't if you were smoke-free? How about insurance premiums: Not only does life insurance cost more because your risk of dying is higher, even your home insurance costs more because you are more likely to set your house on fire.
Your home value can be affected too. Either you take a hit on the home's value for smelling like smoke, or you spend money getting rid of the smell when you put it on the market. Ditto for your car. We haven't even discussed health costs, which not only affect you financially, but more importantly, physically.
They say quitting smoking is harder than quitting heroin. Well, I say blowing up a flat-six-powered German automobile is sacrilege, and you could effectively being blowing up a small fleet of them the longer you smoke.
Preet Banerjee