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Quick Sobriety Tip #4: Calculate Your Savings

How much did your addiction cost?

Benya Clark
Exploring Sobriety
1 min readJan 8, 2025

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Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash

During my first year without alcohol, I often felt like sobriety hadn’t improved my life at all. I had quit drinking, but I was still sad, tired, and lonely.

To fight this feeling, I focused on clear, measurable ways that my life had become better without alcohol. The most obvious of these was the money I saved.

I used to spend about $10 a day on beer, and sometimes far more. Within my first month sober, I had already saved hundreds of dollars, and within the first year, thousands. Now, eight years in, I’ve saved about $30,000. Those numbers are insane!

Saving money might not be the most important part of sobriety, but it’s easy to track and provides powerful motivation on the days when you’re doubting your decision to quit drinking.

This post is part of a series of quick sobriety tips that I’m publishing throughout January. The goal is to help people who have quit drinking by providing easy, actionable advice. For more sobriety tips, check out my recently released ebook and my weekly newsletter.

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Benya Clark
Benya Clark

Written by Benya Clark

I’m a lawyer turned writer from North Carolina. I write about sobriety, mental health, and more. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter at exploringsobriety.com.

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