Ash & Interest
A patient education tool branded for Indiana Oculoplastics Consultants.
A small anti-smoking website. It asks two questions, then walks month by month from the
day you started smoking to today — pricing every month's cigarettes at what a pack
actually cost that year, and growing the same money at what the market actually
returned that year.
No guessing at a pack price. No picking an interest rate. Both come from history.
The two questions
- How many packs a day do you smoke?
- How many days have you been smoking? (with a years → days converter)
That's it. Everything else is looked up.
How the simulation works
For each month between your start date and today:
year = the calendar year of that month
cost = packsPerDay × daysInStep × PACK_PRICE[year]
growth = portfolio × (1 + SP500_RETURN[year]) ^ (daysInStep / 365.25)
portfolio = growth + cost // this month's money invested at month end
spent = spent + cost
Because each year uses its own real return, the invested line is bumpy — you can see
1987, 2000–02, 2008 and 2022 in the chart, and over some stretches it dips below the
money-burned line. That is the honest shape of the thing, and the page says so rather
than smoothing it away.
What it shows
- Total spent, at real historical prices
- What that money would be worth today in the S&P 500
- An animated chart of the two curves against a real calendar-year axis, with hover
readouts giving the pack price and both balances at any month
- Nine stats — cigarettes, packs, the price when you started vs. today, the average
you paid across the whole span, yearly cost at today's price, hours spent smoking,
days of life on the 11-minutes-per-cigarette estimate, and what each dollar became
- A forward projection for quitting today, at 1/5/10/20/30 years
- A sources panel spelling out every assumption
- Links to real quitting help, because a calculator is not a cessation programme
Data
data.js holds the two annual series, 1960 to present.
PACK_PRICE — US national average retail price per pack, taxes included, in that
year's dollars, following the Tax Burden on Tobacco series (Orzechowski & Walker,
continued by the CDC). Two features that look like typos are real history:
- 1993 falls below 1992 — "Marlboro Friday", when Philip Morris cut prices roughly
20% to fight discount brands.
- 1999 jumps ~40% — manufacturers passing on the cost of the 1998 Master Settlement
Agreement.
SP500_RETURN — S&P 500 total annual return (price change plus reinvested
dividends), nominal, before tax and fund fees.
Limits, stated plainly
- Prices are national averages. State-level prices diverge enormously — New York has
run several dollars above the average for years, Missouri several dollars below.
- Everything is in nominal dollars, unadjusted for inflation. A 1975 dollar is
counted as one dollar. This makes historical spending look smaller than its true
value in today's terms, not larger.
- Returns ignore tax and fund fees. Real investing costs something.
- Years listed in
ESTIMATED (currently 2025 and 2026) are placeholders on the
long-run average, not settled annual results, and the current year is incomplete.
The results page says so on screen.
- The forward projection assumes today's pack price holds and the market delivers its
long-run compound average (~10.5%). It won't do that politely year by year.
- Days of life lost uses ~11 minutes per cigarette (Shaw, Mitchell & Dorling, BMJ,
2000) — a population average, not a prediction about any individual.
Updating the data each year
Add the new year to both tables in data.js and remove it from ESTIMATED once the
real figures are known. Nothing else needs to change — LAST_YEAR, the CAGR used for
the projection, and the on-screen caveats all derive from the tables.
Running it
Four static files, no build step, no dependencies.
# just open it
start index.html # Windows
open index.html # macOS
# or serve it
python -m http.server 8000
Publishing to GitHub Pages
- Push this repo to GitHub.
- Settings → Pages → Source: Deploy from a branch, branch
main, folder / (root).
- Live at
https://<your-username>.github.io/ash-and-interest/.
Files
| File | Purpose |
|---|
index.html | Intro, two-step wizard, results |
styles.css | Design system, layout, animation |
data.js | The two historical series and lookups over them |
app.js | Wizard state, the month-by-month simulation, SVG chart |
logo.png | Practice logo, transparent, brand burgundy |
mark.png | Indiana state glyph from the logo |
favicon.png | Tab icon — state glyph reversed on burgundy |
Nothing is sent anywhere. Answers live in localStorage in your own browser and are
cleared by Start over.
Branding
The theme is built on the practice's own colour, #8E2D43, sampled directly from the
logo artwork. Typography is Cormorant Garamond (a classical roman serif, echoing the
logotype) over Lato.
logo.png was derived from the supplied logo file: cropped to the artwork, with the
white background converted to transparency and the alpha normalised so the ink reaches
full opacity. That makes it safe to place on any light surface, and it is reversed to
white in the footer with a CSS filter rather than kept as a second file.
The logo and practice name are the property of Indiana Oculoplastics Consultants and
should only be published with their permission.
Licence
MIT — see LICENSE.
Not financial or medical advice.
