We all know smoking is a terrible idea from a health perspective.
A well-known study in the British Medical Journal estimates that each cigarette shortens your life by about 11 minutes, and on average, smokers live 6.5 years less than non-smokers.

But beyond the health cost, there is a massive financial cost that people rarely quantify.
In this article, I look at not only how much smokers spend, but also how much they could have accumulated if they had invested the same money in a simple index fund.

Spoiler: the gap after 30 years is staggering.

How much does an average smoker consume?

Let’s consider an average French smoker. According to the OFDT, in 2018 a smoker consumed around:

  • 13 cigarettes per day

This number varies depending on gender and age, and the trend is decreasing.
So the numbers below are conservative.

Cigarette prices in France over the years

The price of cigarette packs in France has skyrocketed over the last 30 years, largely due to taxation.

I used historical pack prices available here:
https://github.com/Aunsiels/sp500_simulator/blob/main/data/cigarettes.json

This gives us a realistic yearly cost of smoking over a 30-year horizon.

The investment strategy: simple and realistic

Instead of spending money on cigarettes, imagine someone invested the same amount in the S&P 500 — the simplest index fund you can buy.

Every time the smoker buys a pack, the non-smoker invests the equivalent amount.

This is an approximation:

  • The price of a pack doesn’t buy a whole share → but DCA (small recurring contributions) is common
  • We ignore taxes
  • We ignore fees
  • We assume the S&P 500 historical performance continues (which is reasonable over long horizons)

This is not a sophisticated finance model — just the simplest way to compare both behaviors.

Results: smoking vs. investing

Below is the result of the simulation:

  • Red = money spent on cigarettes
  • Blue = money accumulated by investing the same amount in the S&P 500

After 30 years:

The smoker:

  • Spent ~40,000 €
  • ≈ 2.5× the minimum annual wage
  • ≈ 1.8× the median annual wage

The non-smoker:

  • Ends with ~105,000 €
  • ≈ 6.5× the minimum annual wage
  • ≈ 4.7× the median annual wage

This is in spite of four major recessions:

  • Dot-com crash
  • Subprime crisis
  • COVID-19 pandemic
  • War in Ukraine

The compounding effect of long-term investing is incredibly powerful.

Heavy smoker scenario

What if someone smokes a full pack per day (20 cigarettes)?

Then the equivalent investment becomes:

  • ~163,000 € after 30 years
  • ~10× the minimum annual wage

A brutal conclusion

Smoking makes you:

  • live 6.5 years less,
  • work 6.5 years more,
  • lose tens of thousands of euros,
  • and miss out on six figures of potential wealth.

That’s 13 years gone — fewer lived, more worked.

If you can, replace cigarette spending with simple, regular investing.
Compound interest is slow, then sudden — and always powerful.

The full code for the simulation is available here:
https://github.com/Aunsiels/sp500_simulator