It’s been a week since I began my quest to stop smoking. In just that short amount of time, I’ve managed to cut my smoking in half, from 24 to about 12 cigarettes per day.

I suspect that things will go much slower now, though. I already only take a smoke break every 2 hours or so while I’m at work, so the program hasn’t come in to play there yet. Where it has, is after work, when all I’m doing is sitting on the computer all night and tend to chain smoke.

Since I made such a large cut so quickly, though, I decided to bump the program a month faster, so that I should be down to 2 cigarettes by the beginning of December.

So far, I’ve saved $18.45.

P.S. I finally got the wordpress app to work on my iPhone. Woo, this entire post was written in bed.

P.P.S. Seriously, the Single And Famous EP from MC Lars and K.Flay kicks ass… Check that shit out.

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I am officially never hosting a blog carnival, ever again.

I read a really good blog post a while back detailing the ways in which hosting blog carnivals sucks, but can’t find it now. But I’ll share with you my experience.

This carnival I just posted tonight ended up with a grand total of 4 links. Pretty piss poor for a carnival, and I readily – no, happily – admit that. There were over 30 submissions. The vast majority of them had nothing to do with debt reduction, which is the topic at hand for the Carnival of Debt Reduction. DUH! Out of those 30, I narrowed them down to 7 or 8 that were decent and focused on debt reduction in one way or another. Of those, the ones I didn’t include were either commercial in nature, were more than a week old, or had already been included in another carnival. One really good submission I actually did include in my draft, with a nice little write-up, until I saw a trackback from another carnival.

Am I a hard ass? Yes. But the rules and the theme are pretty freakin’ simple, and that’s pretty much the best way I can put it. I don’t include random personal finance entries, because there are other carnivals for that. I don’t include entries that are already in another carnival, because that’s the rule and you’ve gotten enough promotion for that post already, and you’re just being greedy now.

Over the 2 year lifespan of this blog (yes, Debt Sucks recently turned 2 years old and I didn’t tell any of you, because I don’t care much for self promotion, so bleeehhhh ), I’ve probably been included in maybe 3 carnivals. I submit only my very best posts to carnivals, and I submit them to the proper one. There are other bloggers, however, that seem to think that they need to submit posts every week to several different carnivals. That appears to me that they’re far too focused on traffic more than anything. I, on the other hand, am quite satisfied with my current traffic and readership levels, and would prefer to get out of debt more than anything, documenting my journey for whoever just so happens to swing by.

To anybody I offend… well… I’m, pretty much a professional at that, so don’t expect any apologies from me.

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Time for another Carnival of Debt Reduction! Since I’m still at a loss for creativity, this will be another terribly boring, themeless carnival, for which I apologize. Really, I do. It’s just terrible.

• Alex over at MoneyStance is finding it difficult to get out of debt because his Wife’s Spending is out of Control. If two people in a relationship aren’t on the same page with their finances, progress can be next to impossible.
• Raj at DebtGoal thinks student loans may be the next mortgage bubble, with Student Debt the Next Wave? I agree.
• Matt B at Financial Methods gave me a bit of a wake up call to Think Twice Before Settling Your Credit Card Debt. I’ll have to reference this post in the future, because I might have an offer to decide on come December…
• Miss Bankrupt has eliminated a medical bill! Almost. Not quite. I’m just happy for her that there’s such a small amount left.

Believe it or not, that’s it for this edition of the Carnival of Debt Reduction! I like to stick with the best of the best

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Quitting smoking is certainly the most obvious way of reducting my discretionary spending. Duh. A pack a day at about $4.50 (thanks Obama) works out to $135 per month. However, it isn’t the easiest way to reduce my spending.

I’ve tried in the past to keep track of how many I burn by way of spreadsheets, notes in my phone, tally marks on my arm… couldn’t really keep with it, and it really didn’t make for a good way to force myself to slow down, as I didn’t see the results until afterwards. So today, I bought myself a copy of GottaKickit from the app store for my iPhone. The great thing about this app is that rather than just track how many cigarettes you smoke, it tells you when it’s okay to have a cigarette. As long as you don’t cheat, it gradually slows you down over a period of time. How aggressive you want to be in weaning yourself down to nothing is adjustable, too.

Granted, this is only my first day doing it, but so far, so good. I choose not to leave the app running (where it can ring to let you know it’s time to smoke) as I’d rather wait til I get a craving for one, and check the app to see if it’s okay yet. In doing so, you can go extra time without a smoke, and not even know it.

The app itself was 9 bucks, but that will pay for itself no problem. Even if I fail. I had considered keeping track of how many less cigarettes I end up smoking than normal and funding the secondary savings accordingly, but then I realized that budget surpluses go there anyway. An extra $135/mo would really be nice.

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