healthy living

How much do your bad habits cost?

Good morning Loves.  Let’s be honest for a minute.  Do you have any bad habits? I am not talking about biting your finger nails or compulsively cleaning your home.  I am talking about personal habits that cost you a large amount of money every year.  I admittedly don’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, but I do have a couple of very unhealthy habits.

My bad habits include eating out way too much and spending money on dessert sweets.  I could eat cupcakes and apple pie morning, noon and night and be absolutely happy.  Of course I wouldn’t be healthy, but I’d be happy.   As I get older my body and skin can’t take massive amounts of sugar so I try to avoid cupcakes and apple pie as much as possible so I am not tempted to waste my money.

Personal confession:  Reese Peanut Butter Cups are another one of my weaknesses.  I ate a whole box of Valentine’s Day Reese Peanut Butter Cups in less than 24 hours.  Now that’s unnecessary!

I eat out a lot because I hate cooking and my cooking skills are below average.  Actually below average is putting it nicely.  To be truly honest I absolutely suck in the kitchen – and I’m a vegetarian.  Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I am not married yet.  Maybe if I had dinner on the table every night at 7 p.m. and maybe if I could actually cook an edible meal my boyfriend would be my husband.  Maybe.

Personal confession:  I spend over $4000 a year on eating out.  I know what you are thinking, YIKES!

My boyfriend doesn’t even try meals I’ve cooked unless I have eaten them for two days and not gotten sick.  We had a little incident a few years ago and he just can’t get over it.  I mean seriously, you give a person food poisoning one time and they can never let it go.  My opinion is it’s in the past so we need to move on, but he still takes precautions when it comes to my cooking.

What bad habit would you like to quit this year?

I am all about spending money if it’s for a good reason, but wasting money on bad habits is just not smart.  Unhealthy habits like smoking and drinking can cost thousands of dollars a year.  I think we can all agree that this money could be better spent.

Smoking = $1600 a year.  There is nothing worse than a person who complains about not having any money then turns around and spends $14 a week on cigarettes.  I have no sympathy for people like that.

Lottery = $6280 a year.  Playing the lottery is another bad habit that I think is a waste of money.  Instead of getting your lottery tickets or betting on sports games every week people could put that money in a jar or a high interest savings account and use it for something else like an IRA contribution or a vacation.

Alcohol = $8320 a year.  Drinking alcohol at home, in restaurants and at clubs is very expensive and this doesn’t even include the cab fare to and from the bar.  Use this calculator from Rethinking Drinking to determine how much money you are wasting on alcohol every year.

Photo by lamantin  

1 Comment

  • Oh man, Reese’s peanut butter cups were totally my achilles heel. TIll we visited the US and I gorged on way too many of them; now I can’t even look at them. Haha.

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