Where did all my money go?

According to my Quit Meter, I've saved almost $240 by not smoking over the last 24 days.

Seriously?

OK -- wait, let me quantify that last word. Shonda Rhimes and the cast of "Grey's Anatomy" has made the question, "Seriously?" terribly popular. I just want to let you all know that I seriously said "seriously" long before that TV show debuted.

I think it's a writer chick kind of word, which is why it just had to make it to the front of the entertainment world.

Oh, my gosh, y'all -- no one on Grey's Anatomy smokes. Not even the baddies!

Back to tonight's post: I have saved almost $240 by not smoking. Of course, I've spent $260 on Chantix so far. But I still have $65 worth of Chantix pills left! So that's a savings of, what, $45? YEAH! I think I did the math really well that time. My sister the math genius will let me know if I messed that up. OK, so I've bought two months of Chantix, and I've not smoked for three weeks and three days, and I'm already past the breaking-even point.

Now, my husband and I are "envelope" people. We don't use envelopes any more, but we are the kind of people who put our finances in order by putting all our money into categories. Bill money, grocery money, and daily money. We've been using this method for more than ten years, and it works for us. (Actually, Wesley was using that method before I married him, but I kicked him off track for a few years. And then I almost defaulted on my student loan, and then we got back on track by the "envelope" method. Our credit union gal loves us for this -- we are her most organized customers.)

So. I have had the same allotment for "daily money" as I have had for a few years. (We do have occasional raises in daily money to allow for inflation, y'know. Daily money used to be $15 per day. I don't wanna say how long ago that was.)

Now that I'm not spending some of my daily money on cigarettes, we have more daily money. Somehow most of it gets spent. But sometimes I have a little left over, and I tuck a $5 bill away in the secret compartment of my wallet.

This happens specifically because prescriptions come out of the "bill money" category of our family finances. If I had rolled the daily money surplus over into the bill money category, then I would not have been able to scrimp pennies together every once in a while.

And even though I've only been without a cigarette for about 24 days, I've already taken the whole family out for dinner once. In a nice restaurant. Where they wait on you at your table. And the drinks arrive in glasses, not paper cups. I mean -- this place had cloth napkins. I am not making that up.

I like that. I could taste the food; I could smell the food; I didn't have to cook the food; and someone else washed the dishes. And the whole thing was paid for -- out of what I had saved from not buying two packs of Capri Menthol 120's every day.

I rock.

My sister Amy rocks, too. She has been quit for more than a whole month, now!!!! And she hasn't lapsed at all!!!!! She is a rock star, and I am in awe of her!!!!

Then again, I have always been in awe of Amy. She helped me with my math homework, y'know.