Thanks, i didn't want to tamper with the transaction fees since it appears I'm doing that at my own risk. I couldn't afford the money being lost in the blockchain or not confirmed as i didn't have extra at that time. I still want to know how one manages to gather 'dust' in the process of transaction. I've been using the wallet for about 2 years now and i still intend to have these bits of bitcoin transactions here and there from time to time. I want to avoid the 'dust' that leads to issues as this
If you spend a ten dollars on $9.99 item, you will get one cent back in change.
In bitcoin, each payment you receive is equivalent to a coin in that denomination, so if you receive $4.32, you have a $4.32 coin. When you send $3.98 on an item, you send that $4.32 and receive $0.34 in change. Eventually you get to a point that spending $1 might be made of $0.34 + $0.01 + $0.40 + $0.05 + $0.20. This incurs 5 times the fee. These are known as unspent transaction inputs (UTXO's). These make up the number of inputs on a transaction.