What could you do with and extra $4000 in your pocket instead of in your ashtray?
Hmm. $333 a month. That's my electric, water, and phone bill combined!
And times are tough right now. People are struggling with money everywhere and many smokers find themselves switching from their normal brand to more inexpensive generic brands to save only pennies per pack. Sacrificing flavor and quality(I think Generic cigarettes taste like they swept the tobacco up off the floor) for minimal savings seems like the only relief from the ever-inflating cost of cigarettes.
Or, you could always quit smoking.
(Easier said than done, right?)If your cigarette budget is almost the same as your cell phone bill, It's time to make a change. Time to cut that cost by more than pennies.
How Does $1 per pack sound?
Not as good as smoke free, but WAY better than $4000 a year!!
Sounds like generic to me. I remember a certain 99 cents per pack brand I tried. I got what I paid for, all right. Rolled up dirt with a filter would have been worth more.
I smoke between 16 and 24 cigarettes a day, about a pack per day.
I spend less than $35 per month on my pack-a-day cigarette habit.
That's Right!! I cut my costs by 80%. The best part was all the equipment required to get started cost less than $50 dollars, only $5 dollars more than I was already paying for a carton of my usual brand (a premium brand). So by the second carton, I was already saving money. About $100 was saved the second month and quality and taste were not sacrificed. Here's how I did it.
Making my own cigarettes.
It's nothing new; roll your own has been an option for decades, but with cigarette stuffing machines and filtered cigarette tubes, creating a pack of filtered cigarettes can be done quickly and cheaply. New machines that make the process even faster are emerging. At 10 minutes per pack, the 80% savings is well worth the time.
Here's what happened to me:
When the fire-safe cigarettes first emerged about 3 years ago, my wife and I(both pack-a-day smokers) instantly noticed a foul aftertaste to the new cigarette papers. I had smoked the same brand of cigarettes for 6 years. Suddenly I was getting headaches and my wife was having an upset stomach. We switched to a non FSC brand, and the side effects subsided. When no more brands of non FSC cigarettes were available, we switched to RYO (roll your own) cigarettes made by a $40 dollar machine. The side effects of FSC went away, and we went from spending about $300 dollars a month on cigarettes to about $65 dollars a month on tobacco and tubes, a savings of around $2820 per year!
The savings alone were enough to get me on board. Now, I've mastered the art and can make a pack in about 6 minutes. I tried many different machines, tubes, and brands of cigarette and pipe tobacco until I found the Top-o-Matic injector, the master of the cigarette machines, Rousecco Robust tobacco and Premier Supermatic cigarette tubes to be the best combination. To learn more about different types of cigarette machines and tubes, see this article on Choosing your MYO Materials