Although many people realize that smoking is bad for your health, few realize just how big of an impact it can have on your wallet. If you are finding it difficult to quit smoking the following information may just change your mind. Let’s take a look at just how expensive smoking can be.
- The actual cost of cigarettes - Thanks to cigarette taxes and the higher prices of tobacco, cigarettes are more expensive than ever. If you are on a budget this can easily eat away at your monthly expenses. Even if you are purchasing budget cigarettes, the price is still quite high. When you figure that the average pack costs at least three dollars you can easily spend more than $90 a month if you smoke a pack a day.
- The cost of smoking has on your health insurance - Whether or not you are currently covered by a health insurance policy you may not realize you are actually paying more for the privilege of being a smoker. Health insurance companies charge an additional percentage for smokers and depending on how high your premium is this can add up very quickly. In fact you can end up spending an extra $200 a month just because you smoke.
- The toll smoking takes on your daily life - If you’ve been smoking for several years, chances are, you may find it difficult to take part in many daily activities. Whether it’s chasing your kids around, or a long trek to the parking lot, after time the damage the smoking does to your lungs can make these activities nearly impossible. You may find yourself avoiding these activities and as such avoiding much of life.
- The cost of smoking related health problems - Perhaps the most obvious cost of smoking is the money that you will pay to repair the damage you’ve inflicted on yourself. Whether it’s continuous respiratory infections caused by irritated lung passages, or even cancer, the costs for these health procedures are immense. When you add this to the amount of money you’re already paying in increased health insurance premiums it is clear that smoking can be incredibly expensive.
- The cost to quit smoking - The smoking cessation industry brings in millions of dollars every year. It is big business to try to help people kick this habit that can be very difficult to break. Whether you are paying for prescription medication to help you stop smoking, or you are trying natural methods such as hypnotism, these all can be expensive.
These are just a few examples of how smoking can impact not only your health but also your wallet. Even know many of us do understand that smoking is harmful, it can be difficult to put that pack away. While quitting smoking can be costly as illustrated above, when you compare it to the other expenses you may be facing in the future, it can be considered a very solid investment. Quitting smoking is not easy but perhaps this information about just how much it can cost you will help you find the motivation to kick the habit.
For more health tips that may save your life as well as your wallet, visit Lazy Man and Health.
This post deals with:
... and focuses on:
Posted by Lazy Man on August 28, 2008 in
Health
Is it really possible to make money on Ebay?
I canz make money on Ebay?
Ninety-nine percent of the time that I hear, “make money on
Ebay” it turns out that the person is simply getting rid of stuff they no longer want. I don’t consider that making money, because you lose the possession - one that you likely paid more for in the past. It simply isn’t sustainable. It still serves the purpose cleaning the house and getting a little extra spending cash. Let’s be honest, this way of “making money on Ebay” is not a business.
However, there are a number of people who are making money on Ebay. When I bought coupons on Ebay, I found out that the seller has thousands of coupons for sale. I don’t really know how the person or company does it, but they’ve found a way to charge a fair price for their time and service (clipping the coupons).
It got me thinking, “What kind of business could I start on Ebay?” Like many of the best business ideas, they come when don’t expect them. Let me backtrack and give you the inspiration. My wife often falls asleep at inopportune times. It’s not narcolepsy or anything else that doctors have been able to diagnose. In any case, I often get a little worried when she’s driving late at night. Then I found this caffeine spray. It sounds like a good deal and something that would be handy to have in her purse or car (caffeine always helps her wake up). At $5 it’s about the right price… until you factor in the $6 of shipping to my home - making it a very unfriendly $11 for a single unit. I did an Internet search and found that others felt the same way as I did about shipping. I look around the Internet for some time and couldn’t find the product available cheaper anywhere else (Note: on publishing this article, I noticed that someone added a small quantity of cheap caffeine spray at a cheap price).
So here’s the business idea. Go to Think Geek and buy 1,000 of the sprays for $4,990 plus $121 for shipping (the price for locale may be different than yours). This is a total of $5,111 or 5.11 dollars per unit. If you can find a way to ship a very light item cheaply, you are in business. Of course, it also requires that there’s a demand for caffeine spray - something that I believe to be true. If you can provide it someone for $9 instead of $11, there’s got to be room for you to make a couple of dollars on each sale.
Why don’t I do this myself? Well, I’m Lazy. Physically shipping the item out 1,000 times sounds like work to me (though some of people are doing it, so it can’t be that bad). I don’t want to take the risk of having a 1,000 of these sitting around. I’ve also realized that I’m in the business of producing ideas on this website, not exactly implementing them. That’s a good thing because implementation is often not my strong suit.
So take the idea and run with it… or look run your own Ebay business as a reseller of a unique product. If you do, please leave me a note in the comments.
Photo Credit: Rick and Lynne
This post deals with:
... and focuses on:
Posted by Lazy Man on August 27, 2008 in
Entrepreneurism
It’s been 10 years since I graduated college, excuse me if I’m not fully in character. School was a different time in my life. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about money. My mother raised me to think frugally and I think that stuck in my subconscious.
- Car - I was the one with the car. Many people may say that you don’t need a car in college. It depends on the college, but at many it’s very important. I defer to the PCU quote, “Will you have a car? … Someone on your hall will, find them and make friends with them on the first day …” If you are going to be the one with the car, here are some tips to save money on cars.
- Clothing - Image isn’t everything… Or is it? For the first two years of college I wore sweat pants and sweat shirts almost exclusively. A great female friend of mine showed me that I might want to have something other than tube socks in my sock drawer. I made a decent investment in my wardrobe - going through a bunch of stores at the mall. It was the right idea, but not the right implementation. I would learn a few years later that I could have put together a similar wardrobe from TJ Maxx for about a third of the cost. Women: I’m going to attempt to speak for most men when I say that we don’t really care about fashion too much. With the way my hormones were in college, I could be impressed by breathing and having a pulse ;-). Lesson: Considering doing some research on how to save money on clothing. Random note: 7 years later the aforementioned friend would become instrumental in introducing me to my wife.
- Easy Classes - I wouldn’t be afraid from taking an easy class or two the first semester. College is going to be a whole lifestyle adjustment and while you are there to learn - you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew. Also be careful about classes that appear easy, but take a lot of time. I thought the first level Spanish class would be easy since I had 7 years of it in college, but it required a lot of work. Just because you know the subject doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.
- Technology - When I was in college laptops were very rare and quite expensive. However, you can now pick up an Asus EEE for less than $300 on Craigslist or an Acer Aspire One
. These computers would be perfect for taking notes or hoping online in between classes.
The Money Writers have gotten together to provide you some more Back to School tips
This post deals with:
... and focuses on:
Posted by Lazy Man on August 26, 2008 in
Frugal
In the next couple of hours, my Sitemeter visitor tracking will show that I’ll have my 500,000 visitor to Lazy Man and Money. Google Analytics shows there have been visitors from 197 countries - many that I’ve never heard of. Sadly, unlike the guy in the Bud Dry commercial, the Congo is one of the few places I haven’t been. If you know someone who regularly hangs out in the Congo, I would appreciate it if you could e-mail them one of my articles :-). (Correction: My wife’s brilliant geographical knowledge just informed me that there are two Congos. I have been to Congo - Brazzaville, but not Congo - Kinshasa.)
I remember reflecting what it felt like to have 10,000 visitors. I pictured one-third of Fenway park all going to my website at once. I was expecting and audience similar in size to those who write about their cats, but was surprised by that level of success. To picture such an amount astounded me.
A little over a year ago, you gave me a great wedding gift - 100,000 visitors. That’s three Fenway parks filled. At that level, I started to wonder if a person I see walking down the street has read my site (not really a likely).
Approaching the 500,000 mark, perhaps I’ve out-grown the Fenway park analogy. Then again, it seems like they are adding new seats every year. Why give up tradition? I currently have the traffic of a 15-game homestand. Maybe next year, I’ll be able to say that I have a whole season of fans. Why not? I’m a lot a cheaper, right?
The other interesting thing to note, is that whenever I’m close to a bench mark, I seem to be on some kind of trip. The first time, my wife and I took a long weekend up in Napa. The second time, I was getting married. This came a little early, but I’ll be heading to Thailand and Australia at the end of the week. If there’s something I learned by all this, I need to go on more trips :-).
Here are a few links - probably the last I’ll do until late September:
This post deals with:
... and focuses on:
Posted by Lazy Man on August 24, 2008 in
Links
I got the September issue of Money magazine yesterday and, as always, there are a few eye-opening articles. Every time I feel like I know everything about personal finance, I find that there’s so much I have left to learn. One particular article, on page 24 is titled, “Why You Can’t Teach Money.”
The article is a Money magazine interview with a law associate professor from Loyola… not economics or finance that you’d ordinarily expect. She “specializes in financial product regulation” according to the article. With that background let’s get to the interview… I’m going to paraphrase it, for (a tiny bit of) humor and to avoid having to quote the magazine article in full. I suggest anyone interested buy the magazine and read the article in it’s exact form - rather than my interpretation of it.
Q: Why is financial education so bad?
A: It’s terrible in so many ways. The people who sell financial products pour in major Benjamins to get consumers to buy their horrible products. This marketing negates any education that others might give. Financial products change all the time and educators can’t keep up. “As far as I know, people get pregnant the same way the did when I was in high school.”
Lazy Man’s Take: I like to think that a good number of people get knowledge that supersedes marketing. I have read a lot of personal finance blogs and financial magazines that give me very sensible evidence on why low-expense, index investing works. It has prevented me from buying more expensive financial products. I’m just confused at the pregnancy parallel - I really don’t see the relevance.
Q: Isn’t Budgeting (and other basics) fundamental?
A: It’s a waste of time. Studies show that high school personal finance classes or adult retirement classes don’t help - it may hurt. Those classes give people false hopes that they can manage their own finances and “they end up making worse decisions.”
Lazy Man’s Take: I think this lawyer is biased towards looking at financial product regulation, her specialty, and not personal finance. There are a number of people who learn to make very solid financial decisions (which I realize is hard to define), by educating themselves - and getting education from other people. If you are reading this right now, there’s a good chance you fall into that group.
Q: How now, brown cow? (My mom’s way of saying, “Where do we go from here?”)
A: Give up on teaching people to plan their finances. Try to show people that there are charlatans out there trying to sell you financial products. Politicians need to regulate financial products and change them into things that help consumers rather than educate them.
Lazy Man’s Take: It seems like the best way to get people to realize that there are charlatans out there is to teach people to personal finances. I hate to depend on politicians to do anything for me - especially when I can do them myself.
Q: So How Should Politicians Regulate?
A: People who sell financial products should be required to offer you a safe default product. If you apply for a 50 year, interest only mortgage, you would have to be offered a 30-year fixed option
Lazy Man’s Take: I’m not sure how that would help. It would be very easy for a mortgage lender to show how lower payments for the exotic mortgages are “better” than the higher payments for a 30-year fixed. If people were educated to know the difference… oh wait, you can’t teach people money.
Q: So I should stop teaching my child about money?
A: No, that would be crazy, especially with their daily spending. Children should be taught to resist buying things that are not good for them - happiness is not bought. Families can teach that better than the government can.
Lazy Man’s Take: Whoa… so it’s suddenly okay to teach budgeting again? Just three questions ago it was a waste of time to teach children. I believe that children can learn some things better than adults (language as one example), but I’m not convinced that money is one of them. If you can teach children to resist buying things that are not good for them (i.e. happiness can not be bought), then shouldn’t you be able to teach adults these things?
Is personal finance education a waste of time? I can’t believe that. I can’t believe that education is ever universally a waste of time.
This post deals with:
... and focuses on:
Posted by Lazy Man on August 22, 2008 in
Psychology
Stumble
Reddit
Digg
Del.icio.us
Propeller
