If you’ve been reading finance blogs for a while, you know about the idea of debt snowflaking, and probably about its younger cousin, savings snowflaking. The theory behind the snowflaking method is that no amount is too small. Find a dollar on the floor? Put it towards your debt. Make $3 doing online surveys? Put it towards your debt. Every little bit counts. And once you’ve paid off your debt, build up your savings in the same way.
This morning (note: this entry was written last week), as I was standing in my kitchen waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, I thought about how the concept of snowflaking can apply to the rest of your life. This, of course, is nothing new – we all know about the idea of baby steps, and FlyLady touts her 15 minute cleaning plans. But can it work? Can you snowflake other things as well?
As my coffee brewed, probably no more than two or three minutes, I took the time to wipe down the kitchen counters with a damp cloth. Something simple, and sure, it could wait until I got home after work, but that was one less thing I would have to do.
I’m working on cleaning out my closets. It always seems like such a huge task, as I like to pull all of the clothes off the rack and go through them one by one to decide whether it’s something I will ever wear again, and then try it on to be sure it fits, and then decide whether it’s going to Goodwill or back into the closet. But I could snowflake this task. When I pick out my clothing in the evening, I can pull five things off the rack. Or two things. Or maybe just one extra thing, and make a decision there. Quick and painless.
Got a big project to get done at work that keeps getting pushed aside because it’s not top priority? Every time you find a few minutes, try to get a little bit done. Desk a bit too messy? Straighten up a small part of it while you’re on hold or while you’re waiting for something to print, or, if your office is like mine, while you’re waiting for your computer to complete the log-in process.
What are some other ideas of how to use snowflaking?
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
