Quit alcohol or remain poor forever

The main reason I quit alcohol was that I felt I wasn’t living up to my potential. A close second: always feeling poor.

There was really no good reason for this, given I have a fairly high-paying, steady job.

When you really think about it, however, the financial swing between daily drinking and not drinking at all is HUGE.

I’ve done the math on this a few times already, but just as a reminder: if you’re drinking just a $12 bottle of wine every day — and I know that for a lot of problem drinkers this is pretty tame — you’re spending $4,380 on booze every year.

Throw in some extra binge nights, restaurants and holiday parties, and you’re quickly over $5,000 per year.

When I was drinking daily, I calculated my spending to be about $5,150 per year.

That’s after-tax income. Huge!

Missed opportunities

Now let’s consider the opportunity cost of drinking. This hurts you in two ways.

First, what if you saved the money you wasted on booze — let’s use our $12 a day number again — every year and put it into an investment yielding just eight percent.

After five years, you’d have $26,745.58. At 20 years, you’d have $214,403.43.

Drinking costs you in even more ways that that, however.

Already you’re losing out the investment opportunity cost, but you’re also losing out on the ways you could be generating more income with the extra time and mental clearity you would otherwise have.

This was one of the main motivating factors for me.

I always felt that, if I applied myself, I could start my own business and start generating a lot more income.

And I can tell you — it’s working!

Money influx

I quit alcohol in late August. Since then, I’ve probably saved around $800-$900 just on booze, to say nothing of the dividend income I’ve made since putting that money into investments instead.

I’ve also generated, as of this moment, about $1,500 in extra income outside of my job.

So we’re talking about an almost $2,500 swing in less than three months. And I’m just getting started.

This is extra important to me, because I’m in what many financial experts consider to be the most expensive phase of life.

I have two boys approaching their teenage years who eat a ton of food, need clothing, and play competitive sports.

Frankly, I now need to protect the money that booze was taking away.

The only way I’ve been able to pull off this kind of productivity (this is article №90 since I quit, btw) is by getting alcohol out of my life.

That’s because, more important than money, alcohol steals your time, energy, and focus.

Not only are you not working on projects that are important to you when you’re numbed out on the couch, the work you do eventually try to do is damaged by poor sleep, negative mood, and a short attention span.

And that’s if you manage to do any work at all.

Perhaps you’ll be “too tired” or “not feeling it” because you’re hung over or just too worn out from poisoning your body and mind.

Then you fall into a cycle of not doing anything productive, self-loathing, attempting to do something productive, failing, doing nothing instead.

I can tell you that it really is a terrible way to live.

But I can also tell you that your happiness and financial success are closer than you think.

I quit alcohol less than three months ago and I already feel like everything has changed, personally and financially.

Alcohol wants to keep you poor. Don’t let it.

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