The Beverage Comparison

We don’t buy soda. We just don’t. It’s carbonated sugar that costs way too much. Instead, we brew iced tea year round. Here’s the comparison:

Let’s say you purchase 3 2-liters of your favorite soda for your family at $1.50 each every week. That’s $234 dollars a year. No big deal, right? Let’s compare it to tea to see what that really costs you.

We spend about $1.50 for a box of 100 tea bags. We use 4 bags in a large iced tea jug that is about 192 oz. (approximately the equivalent of 3 2-liter bottles). So, we spend 6¢ for every $1.00 spent on soda by having our sugar-free, cancer fighting, refreshing, and energizing drink. Here’s what happens if you invest the savings on just that switch.

If we assume you can make very conservative interest on your investments at 5% and you pay 15% on your taxes, not even taking into account the cost of inflation for the price of the soda, you could be sitting on close to $10,000 at the end of 30 years. Granted, that’s a long time, but time does make very small amounts of money very large.

Now let’s look at nutrition. Our jugs of iced tea have no calories and the health benefits found in black tea (such as anti-oxidants that help prevent cancer and heart disease). A 2-liter bottle of soda has around 820 calories. Over the course of a year, that adds up to 127,920 calories or the equivalent of over 36 pounds! That’s just in one year.

So you see, being financially healthy can be good on the waistline as well as the wallet.

What other physically and financially healthy switches can we make? Let us know in the comment section below.