[PAR35]

Assuming two packs a day and five bucks per pack, he’d save about $300 per month and could afford a luxurious $700 per month apartment.

Even with your assumptions, we are talking about thousands of dollars. $10 day x 365 days (most years), $3,650 a year. (That's 'thousands of dollars',) So what you call exaggeration, most folks would call clear facts.

[Bob]

Yes, thousands of dollars per year which, when applied to apartment rent, works out to about a $300 per month difference. You might as well say that he’d save tens of thousands of dollars per decade but it would still be $300 per month.