Used to walk right past those big bags at Costco. Figured dark meat was just for people who could not afford the good stuff, and I was all about the boneless skinless breasts. Then my sister made a pot of chicken and dumplings with leg quarters and I could not believe how much better it tasted, juicy and cheap. Now I buy two bags myself and smoke them on the pit out back, then pick the meat for soup and tacos all month. That 75 cents a pound beats anything at the grocery store, even the marked down bin. Guess being wrong about cheap food is the best kind of wrong.

The gum math is what got me. $13 a week is $676 a year, not the $67 you saved in 5 weeks, so the gum was costing you way more than the pods ever did. Here's the part that's off though: the sticky note only works because you were forced to look at it. Your brain wasn't tracking gum as a purchase, it was tracking it as nothing, like air or a receipt you shove in your pocket. So when you say you "caught a sneaky habit," you didn't really catch it, you just finally made the habit visible. That's a big difference, because now the trick is finding the next invisible thing, and it probably won't be snacks. For me it was ATM fees, three bucks here, three bucks there, until I added it up and wanted to cry. Count the small stuff twice before you trust any budget.