Snowflaking

The first time I read about snowflaking was on Paid Twice. It is an adaptation of Dave Ramsey’s snowball method to pay down debt, but snowflaking fits better with my lifestyle. Paid Twice has a great primer, but the general idea is using all of the little bits of income that come in to pay down debt. The key is to do it right away. Since most of my banking is done online this is pretty easy to do.

Most of my snowflaking money will come from mystery shopping, online surveys, and some of my babysitting jobs. So far this month I’ve paid over $450 towards my student loans using this method. A large chunck of that (approx $350) is money that I’d let sit in my paypal account for way too long. Each month I’ll decide how much should go where based on our savings/debt goals.

The other bit of my snowflaking will be my own bit of delayed gratification. This is more for Him (still trying to come up with a blog name for the other half) than me. He’s definitely an impulse shopper and so far this is the best method for redirecting. It’s one thing to continually say “I can’t buy that” and another to see the money necessary to fund your dreams grow. Each time either of us doesn’t buy something that calls our names in the store the same amount of money goes into the down payment account.

Is this something you've been working on? Something that may work for you?

Happy Snowflaking!