I kept a note on my phone every time I booked something this year, with the price, the date I booked, and how I felt about it afterwards. Twelve months of that is enough to see which of the folklore is real.

Short version: two things save real money and everything else is noise dressed up as strategy.

The two things

Being flexible about the day. Not the destination, not the month, just the day. Shifting a departure by forty eight hours in either direction changed the price more than anything else I tried, repeatedly, on almost every route. Tuesday and Wednesday departures were cheaper more often than not, but the pattern isn’t reliable enough to plan around. Just look at the whole month grid and pick the low one.

New phone. Transferred everything. Thought I’d transferred everything.

The authenticator app doesn’t move with a normal backup. I knew that. I knew it in the way you know things you’ve read once and filed under “later.” So at 9:40 in the morning I’m looking at a login screen asking for a six digit code from an app that no longer exists on any device I own.

Behind that login: a few hundred domains. Nameservers, renewals, transfer locks. All of it.

Not a discipline experiment. I just got busy, noticed on Thursday that I hadn’t opened the app since Sunday, and decided to see how long I could keep it going.

Answer: eleven days, and then I looked, and the number was a number.

The first two days were loud

I hadn’t understood how automatic the check had become. Kettle boiling, phone out. Standing in a queue, phone out. Waking at night, phone out. It’s not really about the money at that frequency. Nothing meaningful happens to a position in the ninety seconds between two glances. It’s a slot machine with a portfolio-shaped skin on it.