Thanks everyone for your words of support and encouragement after yesterday's post.

As far as plans for my savings - we have asked our cleaning person to come two hours every week, rather than three hours every other week. That will increase our spending on cleaning by $30 per month. Also, our emergency fund needs attention.

Ima Saver included in her comments the cost of a pack of cigarettes when she started and stopped smoking. That got me to thinking about what a can cost when I started. It seems like it was just under $2? in 1991. More than $1.75, and less than $2.00 seems right. I was buying a premium brand back then.

About 10 years ago that premium brand hit $5.00 a can. That's when I switched to the discount brand I'd been using ever since. It seems like that discount brand was somewhere between $2.25 and $2.50 when I switched. I do remember it being less than half the cost of the premium brand.

Most recently that discount brand has been costing me about $3.00 per can, although certain stores would sell it for as much as $3.60.

I was using anywhere from 7-9 cans per week, so about $25-30 per week.

I bought a 110 pack of nicotine gum on January 4. I have 31 pieces remaining. The pack cost a bit under $50, or about 45 cents per piece. I've been using an average of 4.4 pieces per day, or just under $2 per day.

Here's the good news - since I made my post here yesterday, I've used exactly one piece of nicotine gum! I bought 72 pieces of regular, sugar free chewing gum after lunch yesterday. The 72 pieces cost almost $6, or about 8 cents per piece.

It didn't take me long to determine that I'll need to chew two pieces of this gum at one time, just to get enough volume in my mouth the satisfy my craving, but I plan to do this without nicotine for the duration.

So far, I'm not even trying to limit myself with the chewing gum at all, like I was with the nicotine gum with a minimum of two hours between each piece. With the chewing gum, if I have a craving, I pop two pieces in.

We'll see how long these 72 pieces last. I've used 20 since 1:00 yesterday (it's 9:20 am right now). I'll have to limit myself at some point, but for the time being, and the foreseeable future, I'll not limit myself at all.

The only question I have is what to do with the nicotine gum. Keep it to satisfy a monster craving, or throw it away?

What has concerned me the entire time I've been using the nicotine gum is that I'll just use that to satisfy my addiction, and never get off it. Now that I've taken this step with the chewing gum, maybe it's time to get rid of all forms of nicotine.

But, if I do get a really bad craving, or if something happens in life that I tell myself I "need" a fix, a piece of nicotine gum is way better than buying a can at a gas station.

For now, I'm going to keep the nicotine gum. I'm going to give myself the weekend, and revisit the question Monday.

The cheapskate in me says - I bought the stuff, it would be wasteful to throw it away! The rational side of me says that's part of the reason I used tobacco for so long - I never wanted to throw a can that I had bought away!