No photo today! Instead I want to share something with you. For most of you this might be boring as doing taxes, but if there is just one person who takes something away from this, then my mission is accomplished. I would like to share why and how I stopped smoking. The reason what not the obvious suspect, no it was something most people don’t even think about.

Most people stop smoking due to health reasons. I didn’t. I smoked a lot and I enjoyed it. There was something else that made me thinking of quitting. It was the money. The prices for a pack of cigarettes is constantly rising. Every single year they pushed it up. When I was a kid one pack with about 30 cigarettes would cost 2 DM (Germany Mark, before the Euro). As of January this year one pack with 20 cigarettes goes for 7 Euros. Well, rising prices are nothing new and it happens to all things we buy all the time, but do you know that 80 % of those 7 Euros is pure tax money? Yup, all smokers toss an insane amount of money at the tax office every day on a voluntarily basis. I’m not good with math but you can figure, even without calculating, that this is a stupid amount of money.

When there is something I totally hate, then it’s paying more taxes then I actually have to. I mean, who doesn’t?! See, I smoked 2 packs a day, that’s 14 Euros, 80 % are 11.20 Euro taxed, per day. That’s 78 Euros per week, 314 per month and 3762 Euro per year just in taxes. Now tell me, that isn’t a good reason to stop smoking. You would safe a shit ton of taxed just from not doing something anymore. The only problem was how to get from smoking a lot to not smoking at all. I tried the “just stop it” method and failed. That didn’t work for me. But I learned from experience that if a task seems to hard, then do it little steps.

First thing I did was to look for an alternative and it happened that at that time vaping came out. So I switched from smoking to vaping (with nicotine) and that was a lot cheaper already because our government hadn’t spotted that yet as another opportunity to steal more tax money from us. That step brought more benefits than just dodging the tobacco tax. My sense of smell and taste came back, no more stinking ash trays, no tobacco crumbles and ashes all over the place, no more stink in my home and my cloth. That was already a huge wow effect. I didn’t expect that.

After a while I cut out the nicotine and surprise, my body didn’t even notice. I vaped a bit more just for fun till our government started to tax vaping too and that was the point where I stopped it. Was no problem at all. Yes now and then I still think “oh now a cigarette would be so nice” but the thought comes an goes in a second. It’s more like a memory to something I enjoyed in the past but there is no urge to smoke anymore.

What I did with all the saved money you ask? Well, I got my dog and I spoil her rotten. And there is more money for nice things like this blog for example. And every morning I wake up and think “hehehe no 14 Euros tax from me today, go and shoot yourself in the foot dear tax office” and that alone makes my day already.