I Quit Smoking Last Year and the Money Difference Shocked Me
I did the maths on a Tuesday evening in March because I was bored and because my partner had made one of those comments. The kind that is not really about money but is entirely about money. We never have anything left at the end of the month. She was not wrong. But I was not ready to hear it either.
Twenty a day at fourteen fifty a pack. Been smoking that amount give or take since my mid-twenties. Never once sat down and totalled it because I think on some level I did not want the number staring back at me. When I finally did, the annual figure came out just over five thousand two hundred pounds. More than our summer holiday. More than car insurance, council tax, and every streaming subscription put together.
I tried quitting cold turkey twice. Patches once. Gum once. None lasted a fortnight. What finally stuck was a fifteen pound vape kit from a UK online shop a colleague recommended. She had switched six months earlier and kept banging on about how little her weekly vape juice cost compared to a pack of Marlboros. I did not believe her until I tracked my own spending for the first eight weeks.
The Numbers Side By Side
The first month on vape I spent forty-two pounds. Liquid and one replacement coil. That was everything. A 10ml bottle of nic salt costs between three and five pounds and lasts me several days depending on the week. My cigarette spend had been running at about four hundred and thirty-five a month.
I kept a spreadsheet because I am that person. Month two came in at thirty-eight. Three was thirty-five because I had stopped experimenting with flavours and found a nicotine strength that worked. By six the average sat around thirty to thirty-five.
Cigarettes: over four-thirty a month. Vaping: thirty-three. Gap of four hundred pounds. Every month. Close to four thousand eight hundred across the year.
The money I saved in twelve months off cigarettes paid for a new washing machine, a long weekend in Barcelona, and three months of the car loan. Same salary, same job, same bills. Just stopped setting fire to four hundred quid a month.
Nobody Writes About This
Cost of living coverage fills every paper and every money blog going. Thousands of words about switching energy providers to save ninety pounds a year. Loyalty card hacks. Packed lunches versus meal deals. All worthwhile but nobody seems to mention that a twenty a day smoker is burning through five grand a year on something that is also shortening their life.
Odd blind spot. Maybe smoking feels too personal to frame as a budget line item. Maybe the health conversation drowns the financial one out. Either way the math deserves more airtime, especially now when everyone is looking to trim outgoings wherever they can.
Public Health England has said vaping is around ninety-five per cent less harmful than smoking. That gets debated and I am not a doctor so I will leave the medical argument alone. The money though. The money is not up for debate. It is arithmetic.
What the Monthly Spend Looks Like
My setup is a small pod kit. Twenty-five pounds upfront and it has lasted over a year. Replacement coils are a couple of quid each, swapped every ten days or so. Liquid is where the ongoing cost sits.
Nic salt bottles in 10ml run from 2.99 to 4.99 at most UK online retailers. I go through about two a week. Six to ten pounds on liquid, three across the month on coils, occasional replacement pod for a few more. Thirty to forty total.
Some people spend less. Others a bit more depending on preferences. Even at the high end you would struggle to clear sixty. That is still under half of what two weeks of cigarettes cost me.
The October Tax
Worth flagging. From October 2026 the government is adding two pounds twenty in excise duty per 10ml of vape liquid. A bottle at 3.99 today lands around six afterwards. My monthly spend goes from about thirty-three to maybe fifty. Under six hundred for the year. Fraction of five thousand two hundred. The savings shrink but stay enormous. Cigarettes face their own duty hike at the same time. The gap between the two probably holds proportionally.
What I Did With the Difference
Saving money you then blow elsewhere is not saving. I set up a standing order the first month. Four hundred into a separate account on payday. Same figure I had been spending on cigarettes. Treat it as already gone. Twelve months later: four thousand seven hundred in that account. Barcelona, the washing machine, and there is still money left that neither of us has touched. My partner has not made that comment about the end of the month in a long time.
I know this reads like a piece that is too tidy. It was not tidy. The first two weeks were grim. Still get cravings when wine is involved. Vaping is not a magic fix. But as a financial decision it was the single biggest improvement I have made with money as an adult. Did not give up anything I cared about. Just stopped paying fourteen fifty a day to stand outside in the rain.
Written by Shane Margereson