How Beating Addiction Can Save You Thousands: The Financial Benefits of Recovery
When people talk about addiction and recovery, the focus often lands on health, relationships, or peace of mind.
However, there is often another hidden benefit to overcoming addiction, which is your bank balance. Beating an addiction doesn’t just give you your life back, it can also give your bank balance a much needed boost.
Whether it’s alcohol, drugs or gambling, addiction drains more than just energy and wellbeing. In addition to this, it quietly empties your wallet, too. The truth is, detox and recovery doesn’t just save lives, it also saves your wallet and bank balance too.
In this post, we will discuss the financial side of addiction and recovery and will take a look into what breaking free from addiction looks like in all of its forms.
The Hidden Cost of Addiction
Before we talk about how much money you save from recovering from an addiction, let’s look at how much addiction actually costs in the first place.
Most people underestimate the financial impact of their habits. With this, we do not just mean the cost of buying too many coffees. People often do not realise just how much money they are spending on their alcohol consumption.
When it comes to alcohol, it’s often easy to think ‘well it’s just one more drink.’ However, a small small drink can often turn into too many which can have a huge impact on your bank balance.
Even if you only spend £30 on drinks just two or three nights a week, this can end up costing you thousands of pounds each year.
Likewise, smoking and abusing drugs are often very expensive, with the cost of this addiction rising each year. Likewise, a gambling habit or addition can result in losing thousands of pounds on a regular basis.
When it comes to drinking specifically, it isn’t just the drinks that end up costing you a lot of money.
You also need to consider things such as the Ubers home, the hangover takeaways, the sick days, the “treat yourself” purchases after a binge. Addiction doesn’t come cheap, and the total bill is often much larger than we realise.
According to a recent study carried out by the Office for National Statistics, households across the UK spend a surprising amount each year on alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational substances.
For those struggling with addiction to these substances, that figure can multiply significantly.
A Fresh Start for Your Finances
When someone decides to detox from drugs or alcohol, they’re not just cleansing their body, they’re also cleaning up their spending too. Whilst this might not be front and centre of why someone might choose to detox and recover in the first place, it is a huge benefit to detoxing and can be a big motivational tool to help them to recover.
The detox stage can be tough, but it’s often the turning point where the realisation hits. Many people in early recovery find that within the first few weeks of sobriety, their bank account already looks healthier.
They stop spending money on their addiction, they spend less money on ‘impulse purchases’ such as clothes, takeaways or coffees. Likewise, during their time in rehab, they tend to spend less daily money on meals and transport.
A period of detox, whether done through professional rehab or at home with support, marks the financial reset button. It’s the start of a more mindful relationship not just with yourself, but with your money too.
An alcohol home detox is unarguably the cheapest way to approach this process. A residential rehab will charge between £3,000 and £7,000 for an inpatient detox, whilst an alcohol home detox can cost under £1,000, to essentially undergo the same treatment at your own home.
The Cost of Drug and Alcohol Rehab
Some people worry that entering drug and alcohol rehab is expensive. To be completely honest, it can be. However, the cost of attending drug and alcohol rehab can depend massively on the type of rehab you attend and how long you stay.
If you are wanting to attend drug and alcohol rehab, but are worried about the cost, then it is important to view attending drug and alcohol rehab as an investment, not as a cost.
Private drug and alcohol rehab can cost anywhere between a few thousand to several tens of thousands of pounds, depending on location and duration.
However, when you consider the ongoing cost of addiction, including the financial losses, reduced productivity, health issues and even potentially legal trouble, rehab often pays for itself many times over.
Rehab offers a way out, not just physically but financially as well. In addition to this, completing a drug and alcohol rehab programme can help you rebuild your career and even improve and increase your earning potential in the future, too.
For those who can’t afford private drug and alcohol rehab treatment, there are also NHS funded treatment options available to you. However, it is important to understand that there are long waiting lists associated with NHS funded rehab treatment.
Addiction also clouds your judgement. It makes even the most financially savvy person take risks or ignore the reality of what their addiction is costing them, or the path they are on.
When addiction takes over, bills become less important than getting your hands on drugs or alcohol. In the meantime, savings disappear and debt builds up.
Once you attend drug or alcohol rehab, budgeting becomes a part of your recovery and route to a normal and more healthy life. Likewise, you can start to repay your debt more quickly and stop spending money on impulse cravings.
Rebuilding Your Income Potential
Addiction can quietly sabotage a career. When someone suffers from an addiction, they often make a habit of missing deadlines, arriving late to work or even calling in sick.
Those who are addicted to certain drugs such as cocaine or cannabis often become lazy and lack motivation, having a huge impact on your work and your long term career.
Once you detox and commit to rehab, you’re not just regaining health, you’re also regaining your earning potential. Many people find that within a year of recovering from a drug or alcohol addiction, they’re performing better at work, networking more confidently and even exploring new career potentials and opportunities.
In addition to this, employers notice reliability, focus and improved motivation levels, making them more likely to promote you and trust you with more and more responsibility. This is usually where pay increases.
The Knock on Effect of Financial Stability
Money doesn’t just impact your bank account, it also affects your relationships, housing, and overall stability in life in general. Addiction has a huge impact on your relationships, destroying trust between partners, family members, and colleagues.
When people are addicted to drugs and alcohol, they are also a lot more likely to miss a rent payment, break a promise or lie to those around them, damaging their relationships.
This can also then have a huge impact on your housing situation, with many people leaving relationships with nowhere to go, and nowhere to live.
When you recover from an addiction, things start to reverse. Your relationships improve, rent is once again paid on time, bills are settled and family life becomes calmer and therefore more stable.
A Guide to Budgeting
If you have just recovered from a drug or alcohol addiction and want more help and advice on how to budget, then below are a number of tips on how you can do so.
Here’s a few tips and approaches that you might want to start using on a day to day basis. You should always try to track every penny, with a number of free apps such as Money Dashboard and Emma being great tools to help you keep on track of your budget. You should also list your financial prioritises, which might be saving money or paying off debt.
You should always try to set realistic and small goals to begin with. Do not aim to save thousands of pounds each month or each year. Instead, be fair to yourself and make sure that you are not putting too much pressure on yourself.
Once you start to get on top of your finances and your budget, you will start to feel a lot more in control and happier.
To Conclude
Overcoming an addiction issue is one of the most powerful ways to transform your life and your financial future. The money you once spent feeding a habit can now fund dreams, savings, travel and even just a peace of mind that everything is going to be okay.
Detox and withdrawal might start as a health decision and rehab might feel like a personal one, but have huge financial benefits associated with them too. So, if you’ve been wondering about whether recovery is worth it, it’s important to remember that it will be.
Sobriety doesn’t cost you your health, your fun or your freedom, it also costs you thousands of pounds. The important thing to remember is that there is hope and that you are more than capable of turning around your life and your bank balance.