4 Reasons Drinking Is Killing Your Financial Health
It was one of those rare occasions that my birthday fell on a Saturday night. I was so excited to “go out” and had invited friends to meet me at the bar. I was wearing a pair of Guess jeans that I had charged on my maxed out credit card. Due to my missed credit card payments and skyrocketed interest rates those jeans probably ended up costing me about $4,000.00. Anyway, I felt cute, excited, and a guy that I liked was going to be there.
I desperately wanted to seem cool and relaxed but mostly I wanted that guy that I liked to think I was awesome. He had no interest in me but I thought I could change that by buying the whole bar a round. Or at least, that what my drunk self thought. I think I spent close to $500 on drinks that night. This was more money than my rent at the time.
As a young drinker I made horrible financial decisions. I was making very little money and when I was drinking what little financial hope that I had was overtaken by my desperate need to “be” fun.
As I aged, I stopped buying the whole bar shots and got a better hold on my financial situation. But even then, drinking was costing me. A $36 bottle of wine with dinner, $8 IPA’s from swanky breweries, a $14 six pack of seasonal beers became the norm.
Since I’ve stopped drinking I’ve saved thousands of dollars. It wasn’t just the drinks that were costing me money.
Here are the four reasons that drinking killed my financial health.
Drunken Spending. It’s a fact that drinking lowers inhibitions. While I drank, chemical misfires were happening behind the scenes. Alcohol disrupted my norepinephrine and prefrontal cortex. These are the parts of the brain that affect impulse control and the decision making process. In other words, while impaired, I wasn’t thinking too much about my money problems. Instead, I was like “Let’s have another” and gave no f’s about the consequences. That doesn’t even include the cost of cover charges, cab rides, or a quick buzzed trip into the gas station to load up on $10 worth of things I thought I needed.
Alcohol is Expensive. Even when I matured and stopped buying the bar a round, drinking is was an added cost. Between drinks with the girls, that bottle of wine I bought every couple of nights, a few drinks on date night, and the Trader Joe’s wine sale, things got pricey. I was easily spending $100 a week on drinks.
Hangovers Cost. I woke up most mornings feeling bad about myself. In my younger drinking days, I would beg my girlfriends to meet for brunch and/or shopping so that I could take my mind off of the guilt and shame I had for getting too drunk the night before. When I was older, I would find myself buying expensive smoothies or exercise equipment in order to detox myself. When I felt bad about myself all of the time, I was spending money…. money to make me feel better, money to make me look better, money to distract myself from the real problems, and more.
Lack of Motivation. As a drinking person my capacity was so low. I could do my one job, take care of my kids, kind of clean my house and do other chores and that was it. I started drinking at 5p and from then until bedtime I was checked out. The thing I did was drink. As a sober person though, my capacity is endless. I don’t spend my nights drinking and my mornings recovering from drinking and so those hours can be filled with other things. Often times, those things are different streams of income. I have motivation to work and so I have lots of jobs (real estate, author, speaker, program developer, and more) and each of those put a little extra money in my pocket. Money that I would have previously spent on booze.
There are so many downsides to drinking. The financial burden is just one more result that we’ve come to accept without question. Would we allow ourselves to buy three or four $8 desserts at dinner? Would we spend $100 a week on shoes or clothes? Would we donate $50 to a charitable organization each week? Would we let our kids buy $5 drinks every time we went somewhere? I know I didn’t.
When’s the last time you added up how much you spend on booze?
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Originally published at https://www.spaliveaf.com on October 5, 2021.
