The Sobriety Solution

Do you really know how much drinking has cost you on a daily, weekly and yearly basis? Does $3,000,000 dollars come as a shock? I bet you have a good idea when it comes to this week or month how much drinking cost you, but if you drink regularly you are probably underestimating the real cost of your drinking throughout your life. When I was reading Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and he mentioned how much money you would save over your adult life if you invested one of your monthly car payments into your retirement account instead I quickly realized how this applied to my drinking.

So let's take a closer look at this. First, let's assume you spend about 11 dollars a day on alcohol and you do this over your adult life for roughly 40 years. If you were to get the average rate of return from the stock market over this time (11% from 1932-2008) you would be drinking away almost 3 million dollars. So the first question you probably ask is do you really spend 350 dollars a month on drinking? You would have to answer that, but what I can tell you is even if you are a very economical drinker, but still drink 4 or more nights a week, it would still be easy to surpass this number monthly. The older I got the less time I spent in bars, but also the more I drank. But even if I only went 3 times to a bar over the month and spent 30 dollars a visit all of a sudden my daily "budget" for drinking just dropped down to 9 dollars for the rest of the days of the month. The honest truth I have to face is that over my drinking "career", even with these conservative numbers, my drinking cost me 300,000 dollars. That number doesn't sound as bad as the 3 million, but if you are familiar with compound interest the real growth of your wealth happens in the latter years, which I lost by drinking away the money in the early years.

Regardless, the scary part is this is only a tiny part of the equation. How much has alcohol cost you indirectly? For most this number easily surpasses the cost of alcohol itself.

To read the rest of this blog go to The Real Cost of Alcohol

Dave Andrews

Alcoholics Anonymous! Those two words instilled a deep sense of fear and failure in me for most of my adult years. Fear of what pain I might experience going to one of these meetings. Failure because for me I considered going to AA as my very last ditch effort to get sober, which means I failed A LOT to get to that first meeting. So it is hard to believe that today I find AA to be one of the greatest organizations in the world, especially with regard to helping others recover from addiction. But the real truth is many people are exactly like me and it took them years before they gained enough courage, or became desperate enough, to finally go to AA. For me it was 9 years and 3 months between my first break down and acknowledgement with regard to my drinking problem until I finally stepped foot into an AA meeting. That was my path and I accept that, but it is still hard for me to not wish I had tried AA sooner.
As I look back I ask myself why I was so afraid to step into those doors. Most of the reasons are completely illogical, but fear is a powerful emotion that can overcome all sense of logic. I was fearful of someone finding out about how much I really drank. I was fearful that I would run into someone I knew. I was fearful that I would be forced to share something that I wasn't comfortable with. I was fearful that I would have to say those dreaded words of truth, like in the movies, "Hi, My name is Dave and I am an alcoholic". And really that was just the beginning of the fears I had.
What changed? There were quite a few events that moved me closer to my first AA meeting, but one I was just thinking about last night and wanted to share. I was up in Evergreen, Colorado with my family on a Saturday and, as usual, was a bit hung-over and just not that energetic. I of course was thinking about how many more hours it was until I could drink again.

If you want to read the rest of this check out the article on my website at The Sobriety Solution

Dave Andrews