How Drinking and Driving Can Ruin Your Financial Future

It’s Friday night and David has just enjoyed an evening out with his friends. They were at the bar, and he’s about to get into his car and head home. He puts his arms out and takes a couple of steps to test his dexterity and feels like he’s okay to drive. After all, he only had a couple of drinks and there’s no one on the road this late at night. “I’ll be fine”, he says to himself.

What should he do?

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Drinking and driving is not only a serious crime, it’s also a very costly one. Even if he’s lucky enough to avoid hitting a telephone pole or another car, getting pulled over can trigger financial consequences that reach deep and last for years.

Everyone knows that alcohol and cars don’t mix. But there’s always someone who stays out a little too late, has one too many drinks, and convinces themselves they “feel fine” – or figures that driving just a short distance is okay. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), someone is killed in a drunk-driving crash roughly every 44 minutes in the United States, and impaired driving results in more than one million arrests each year.

Before you get behind the wheel, it’s important to understand how a conviction can affect your finances. Even if you think of it as a minor offense, it can change your life – even if you manage to avoid a conviction.

As a disclaimer: if you think you can get valuable legal advice free from the internet, think again. For legal advice, you need a lawyer. No one else (especially people who write blog posts) knows your situation. Get a lawyer. You’ve been warned.

Terminology

Every state has made operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicating substances illegal. DUI stands for “driving under the influence”, DWI stands for “driving while intoxicated” or “driving while impaired”, and OUI stands for “operating under the influence”. Quite a mouthful.

Even though there are slight differences between these definitions, they’re all basically the same for the purposes of this article – you drank too much alcohol or got high and then got behind the wheel.

Many states also include driving under the influence of prescription or recreational drugs in their legal descriptions of DWI offenses. Having a note from your doctor won’t let you put other people at risk. State laws either specify an amount of a controlled substance that can be present in the bloodstream, or they adopt a zero-tolerance rule. Either way, a DWI can cover a much larger range of influence than just alcohol.

Penalties, Costs, and Consequences

It’s impossible to say exactly what a DUI will cost in any given case. Even charges within a single state vary widely depending on the circumstances. But it’s important to know that your costs will go far beyond attorney’s fees, criminal fines, or lost wages. This is the kind of unplanned expense that can wreck a budget overnight, which is exactly why it helps to track your expenses and know where your money is going before an emergency hits.

Courts in every state can impose fines, require jail time, restrict your driving, confiscate your vehicle (permanently, in some states), and require the costly installation of an Ignition Interlock Device to test your blood alcohol content (BAC) before your vehicle will start.

Hiring a lawyer to defend your case can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands.

After being fined by the court, having your vehicle confiscated, paying your attorney, and missing work, you’ll still have additional fees to pay:

• Car storage or impoundment fees: starting at $30
• Probation supervision fees: as much as $1,200
• Towing fees: around $150 on average
• Alcohol evaluation: $200
• Ignition Interlock Device installation and rental: up to about $1,500
• Community service supervision fees: $80
• Victims Assistance Fund fee: $78
• Victim Impact Panel fee: $25
• Victim Compensation Fund fee: $33
• Brain Injury Fund fee: $15
• Law Enforcement Assistance Fund fee: $90
• Alcohol education or treatment class fee: up to $1,000

These add up to roughly $4,300 in fees alone – and that’s before fines, legal costs, and lost income. Many studies estimate the true all-in cost of a first DUI at $10,000 or more once everything is tallied – the kind of hit that can push someone straight into credit card debt they’ll spend years climbing out of.

Insurance

Drivers convicted of a DUI can expect their car insurance rates to rise – a lot. Almost every insurer treats a DUI as a major risk factor and raises the premium accordingly. The exact amount varies by state, but a DUI conviction commonly increases premiums by 70% or more, and those elevated rates can persist for years. Over a decade, the added insurance cost alone can run into the tens of thousands of dollars – the equivalent of several taxi rides home every single week.

If you want to see how a hit like that would ripple through your monthly spending, it helps to build a realistic budget and know exactly what room you have before costs like this land.

Lost Wages and Limited Employment Opportunities

Even without a conviction, you’re likely to spend some time dealing with the legal process, which can eat into your work and result in lost wages. A conviction may make it legal for your employer to fire you, demote you, or take other adverse action. If you rely on your license for work, a DUI can be seriously detrimental to your job – and potentially your entire career.

With a criminal conviction, many states limit the types of jobs you can hold and can restrict access to educational scholarships. A single night’s mistake can follow you for years.

Medical Expenses, Property Damage, and Liability

If you were pulled over and your DUI didn’t involve property damage or injury, count yourself lucky. If you were involved in a crash, you can be liable for property damage, hospital bills, and restitution if someone was injured or killed. Even with insurance, you can face damages reaching into the millions – the kind of financial hit almost no household could absorb.

This is exactly the sort of catastrophic, unexpected expense that a solid emergency fund is meant to guard against – though no fund is large enough to fully cover the worst-case outcomes here.

The Bottom Line

When all of this is taken into account, it’s hard to imagine the financial risk of getting behind the wheel is ever worth it. Fortunately, David came to his senses and made the financially wise choice to take a taxi home that night. Compared to the potential costs – plus the risk to his life and the lives of everyone else on the road – it might be the best $30 he ever spent.

The smarter money move is always the boring one: plan ahead, keep a cushion for the unexpected, and never let a single night wipe out years of progress. A budgeting tool like PocketGuard can help you build that cushion and see, at a glance, what you can safely spend – so a night out stays a night out.