Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 October 1875 — What Smoking Costs. [ARTICLE]

What Smoking Costs.

Probably not many who smoke Cigars regularly are aware of the expensiveness of the habit. They whiff away their Havanas without a thought of what the practice is actually costing them. It is only five cents or ten cents a time, and so they indulge, unconscious that they are converting houses, lands, capital and the essentials of life, into smoke. -But let us look at it in the light of arithmetic. Suppose, gentle reader, that you should save die money you pay for cigars and put it into the savings bank where the interest will be compounded semi-annually—have you the slightest idea of the amount of such savings in the run of years? Beginning with die lowest daily cost of the use of tobacco: 2% cents a day deposited as above will amount to $lO in a year, to $l3O in ten years, and to $2,900 in fifty years. How many smokery, who have been in the habit for fifty years, have kept themselves down to 2% cents a day? If you should lay aside in tlifi same manner ac cents per day, it would amount to S2O in a year, $260 in ten years, $5,800 in fifty years. Saving likewise eleven cents daily, you will have S4O at the end of the year, $520 in ten years, and $11,600 in fifty years. This last sum, if saved by the young clerk, in a single decade would leave him quite a little capital to, invest in some legitinfete business. And many poor young men in this city are spending eleven cents daily for cigars or tobacco! But let us step up higher. Laying aside 27% cents per day you save SIOO in a year, $1,300 in ten years, and $29,000 in fitly years. In the same ratio fifty-five cents a day foots S2OO the first year, $2,600 in tenyears, and $58,000 in fifty years. If-you should save sl.lO a day, it would leave you S4OO at the end of the year, $5,200 in ten years, and $116,000 in fifty years. Now we’ ask the earnest attention of smokers to the above figures, and put the question whether they can really afford to indulge in a practice so costly. Take the eleven cents a day. The sum at the end of the year would leave you S4O, enough to pay the bread bill for quite a family. By studying the above can you not see how you are unconsciously sending off into space to make the circuit of the globe money that would purchase a good homestead, and leave you something besides to make comfortable your old age? We recommend to.all smokers to take an evening, sit down with their families, and consider whether they can afford to smoke; whether their happiness, their future prospects and their respectability would not be greatly exhanced by a total discontinuance of the odious practice.— Worcester Palladium.