Buying $12 packs of cigarettes daily or even weekly adds up to create quite a dent in your wallet; smokers are most likely aware of this conundrum. But what they may not realize is that the habit of smoking can cost up to $1-2 million over the course of a lifetime: yes, you could be a millionaire eventually if you saved that money instead.

According to a new state-by-state analysis from WalletHub, the total cost over the course of a lifetime for smokers in all 50 states ranged between $1 million and $2 million — depending of course upon the price of packs in each state. WalletHub calculated the “potential monetary losses — including cumulative cost of a cigarette pack per day over several decades, health care expenditures, income losses and other costs — brought on by smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke,” Richie Bernardo writes about the report. “[W]e assumed an adult who smokes one pack of cigarettes per day beginning at age 18, when a person can legally purchase tobacco products in the U.S. We also assumed a lifespan thereafter of 51 years, taking into account that 69 is the average age at which a smoker dies.”

According to the Surgeon General, over 20 million people in the U.S. have died in the past 50 years due to smoking — including secondhand smoke. On top of individual costs of smoking, tobacco use creates quite a healthcare burden too. The economic and societal costs of health issues from smoking are around $301 billion per year ($116.4 billion in health care costs). There are currently over 60 million people in the U.S. who continue to use tobacco.

In order to reach their estimates, WalletHub took the average cost of a pack of cigarettes in each state, multiplied it by the total number of days in 51 years, and also estimated the amount of return a person would have earned if they had invested their tobacco money into something more useful, like the stock market (this latter part was of course a bit far-fetched, but something interesting to bring up). The analysis calculated that South Carolina is one of the cheapest states for smoking — only adding up to about $1,097,690 over a lifetime. This is because cigarettes are cheaper there than in New York, for example, where a pack a day for a lifetime could add up to $1,982,856.

Even if the analysis numbers seem inflated, the point of the matter is that smoking can be exceedingly expensive — even if you claim to be a bit more practical than most smokers by rolling your own. Either way, the instant gratification of a puff of smoke can lead to a lifetime burden of financial and health problems, and it's something to keep in mind during the CDC's Tobacco Week.