Today’s announcement that cigarettes are going up to $17 a packet made me consider what people would save if they quit smoking and put their savings on their mortgage. Here’s what I found out by using Sorted’s calculators:

If you smoked a packet a day that’ll cost $238 per fortnight in 2012.

If you have a mortgage of $200,000 at 7% interest you’ll need fortnightly repayments of around $652 to repay it over 25 years.

The interest you’d pay over on that mortgage over 25 years is $223, 861. That’s just the interest.

If you quit smoking and put the money you spent on cigarettes into your mortgage repayments you’d make repayments of $890 per fortnight.

The result of this wee action would mean you’d pay $107,482 in interest and pay off your mortgage in just 13 years and 4 months.

That’s a saving of $116,379.

Visit Quitline now.