Stop smoking, send your kid to college.
No, seriously.
Let’s say that you put back one hundred dollars a month for eighteen years into a savings account for your kid’s college expenses. Without interest, your total is $21,600.
Let’s say you smoke a pack a day. Forgetting leap years, because they’re a bother, a pack a day at five dollars a pack over eighteen years is $32,850.
Even if you smoke a pack a day but buy by the carton, forty-dollar, ten pack cartons at a pack a day (three cartons a month) for eighteen years is still $25,920.
Now, seriously, stop smoking and send your kid to college.
I’ve been a smoker for two years, but it’s time for me to quit now, before I get sick, before I have kids to worry about, before I spend even more money than I have. I bet I’ve spent a figure just below fifteen hundred dollars on cigarettes. In two years! I’m twenty, do you know how many shoes that is?
Smoking is a poor man’s vice and a rich man’s fancy, but the ones hurt most are the kids — the ones who start smoking and the ones who don’t even realize that their college expenses are burning up right before them.
Moms, dads, if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your kids. Does that sound snobby and overbearing, especially coming from a smoker? Just ask yourself why you can’t save a hundred dollars a month for your kid but can afford your cigarettes.