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I don’t used to feel that bad when I’m sick because I get to miss school (now work). Every time I’m sick, I just call and say that I’m not coming in and I get to rest at home. At my work, I get 48 hours of sick time a year. Even if I don’t use them (I used a total of 4 hours last year), I lose them since they do not accumulate so it made sense to use them.

However, as I got older and more in tune with finances in general, I realized that getting sick can potentially be quite expensive. In this post, I won’t go into the costs of major sickness and only want to talk about the common stuff like cold and fever etc. How much does these costs us?

Seeing the Doctor
We have health insurance at work but we still have to pay a fee of $20 every time we see a doctor. If I have to see my family physician and then he refers me to some other specialist, the costs of this adds up pretty quickly. Usually, they also prescribes some type of medicine, costing even more money.

Lack of Opportunity to Decide
Seeing the doctor are obvious costs, but how about the missed opportunities because we were sleeping to recover our energy or we were at the doctors waiting for our turn? The world is revolving constantly and it definitely won’t wait even though we are sick. For most of us, this is usually not much of a problem when we just have a flu or cold but as we become older and our responsibilities grow, the potential that any missed chance be significantly costly increases.

Misjudgement because of Mental Weakness
Even if we had the chance to decide, we might not be in the right mindset to make a judgment. Would we decide to buy or sell a stock when we are really sick? What if we had to for some reason? How about negotiating a deal for our work place when we are sick? In these scenarios, a wrong judgment could even cost us our business or job.

Final thoughts
Okay, maybe I was exaggerating a bit and that it is not this bad. However, I am not as focus when I’m sick and I often make decisions that I regret later in these situations. As we grow older, the decisions we make will have a bigger impact on not only us but everyone around us. Therefore, we must take more care with our bodies when we are healthy so we get sick less often. When the times come when we do feel sick, we must take extra care in making important decisions so it doesn’t cost us unnecessarily.