Snowflaking is a more basic and simple approach to the snowball effect to debt reduction. When you think of snowballing, you think dollars a day while when you think of snowflaking, you think of pennies a day.
With this approach, even a dollar a day extra can accumulate to a large reduction in time. I would use this to pay off the higher interest debt first. Adding the snow flake effect as extra monthly principal.
You can take income from minor second income ventures as well.
Ebay.com - One approach is to sell items on ebay.
Craigslist.org - craigslist then take the extra income to apply it to snow flakes.
Survey Online - Another approach would be to take surveys online.
Yard Sale - Even old methods such as yard sales can deem valuable and effective to the cause.
You can use any of these methods to gain extra income and you should send payments immediately or as soon as your permitted to.
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One of the greatest money savers comes weekly in the form of the Sunday papers.
Every week you get these great coupons and updates on the weeks greatest deals in your area. I started this and I am able to save a few extra bucks every week.
I can save on grocery items and even electronics. I love electronics and that is my vice. I can stay semi current while still saving by being frugal on my purchases.
Never take those little silent coupons lightly as they can save you a ton in time.
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I was very fortunate to always get what I wanted when I was growing up. All I had to do was say I wanted something and sure enough I would get it. That made me into an impulsive buyer when I became an adult. I never looked for sales and therefore money just trickled out of my savings account.
I am not going to talk about looking for coupons or impulsive buying. When you work so hard to save money into a savings account you want to keep it there.
Save Money and Keep your Saved Dollars
- Create a personal budget - very important first step. The best way to save money is to trim what doesn’t need to be spent.
- Depending on your income and expenses you will know a reasonable number to set aside solely for savings. Declaring a realistic figure like $25-$50 per week or maybe even bi-weekly.The point is something is always better then nothing so don’t get discouraged if it seems like a small amount.
- The 3 Bank Account Difference - the 3 accounts all serve a distinctive purpose.
- Spending Account - this account can be a checking or savings account. This account will receive paychecks and will take the role of dealing with daily expenses. This one is okay to have an ATM card in order to withdraw money for day to day activities.
- Rainy-day/Emergency Fund Account - this will be your emergency blanket. This will cover any unforeseen emergencies. Job loss, car repairs, household repairs, house tax increases and so on.This account should have no ATM card and should be emergency use only.
- Savings Account - this account also should not have and ATM card and you will not transfer out money from this account for day to day purposes or things like groceries and so on.I use currently use Paypal’s money market account for this and I also use Sharebuilder money market account.
- Fill up Emergency Funds Account - this account should be filled up before the savings account.As a rule of thumb try to save enough to cover all of your expenses for at least the next 6 months or do like me and save enough for 10 months
- Save Money Now - when you have a nice emergency fund setup and ready only then would you start saving.Try to set an automatic transfer that occurs every two weeks or every month. Automatic transfers makes sure that you do it and you never have to worry about remembering.I picked up this from David Bach and his Automatic Millionaire book.
No worries about tracking where your money goes and wondering if you put money in.
That’s it to automatic savings and novice budgeting.
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To become financially independent you will first need a road map that will help you attain that level of independence. I have been playing around with some methods and I found that these were some good methods to help me out. A good road map should help you get out of debt, invest, budget and plan for retirement.
Making Money Methods
- Set Goals - What do you want to do? Make money, attack debt or plan for retirement. Hopefully you will like to do all of these things at once. I planned to set my goal to increase wealth and in that respect to increase wealth.
- Read Personal Finance - Read every web article, book and subscribe to personal finance magazines.
- Track Spending - Track all of your expenses so you can see where your money is going. I realized that I spent about $60 per week at Duane Reade. You know that was cut later on.
- Cut Expenses - This goes hand in hand with tracking expenses. You then analyze where you spend too much and then trim them out of your budget.
- Decrease Debt - Start cutting down credit card debt. Start with the smallest debt then work your way up to the big ones. Shop around better interest rates then call up your current credit card and tell them to rate you can get and see if they will negotiate. If they do fine but if not then transfer the debt to the new one and close the old credit card immediately. Cut your total credit cards down to 2 maximum cards.
- Extra Income - Look into alternate streams of income. I use dividend stocks, Google Adsense, web advertisement, regular 9 to 5 job, high yield money market account for liquid money, rent house/apartment.
- Purchase Stock - I would say to purchase dividend stock because they increase per share and they still function as stock.
- Purchase Property -By purchasing a property, you increase your wealth automatically and fast. You force yourself to save and properties increase with inflation.
This simple but highly effective methods are so simple when you think about it, but highly effective. These cover making money, removing credit card debt, gaining extra income, cutting expenses with a tighter budget and planning for retirement by learning steps to increase wealth.
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The buzz is that there is a contender to Quicken and it is web based and free. You can check your finances anywhere and at anytime you wish. It has a nice look and feel with speed from the Ajax backend that it was built on. I am no super finance guru but I will give the review that I feel best with for average to intermediate users.
Advantages
- Fast.
- Free.
- A rival to Quicken even in its beta stage.
- Easy setup.
- Accessible anywhere.
- Beautiful Ajax design.
- Tons of graphs and charts.
- Easy way to see trends.
- Nice feature named “Ways to Save.”
Truly one of the best rivals to Quicken and it is free to use with no installs to worry about. It is built on a web technology that allows it to load various parts of the web page in an auto update way. I just added my user name and password for my various accounts and waited a short minute or less for account history to be updated; then I was ready to rock. They added a plethora of charts and graphs to show spending habits in a glance. You can even check spending habits as easy as just viewing your personalized trend reports page. Mint.com truly tries to make personal finance as easy as checking your email. A good feature that I really like is the “Ways to Save” money section. I love it because what it proposes to do is automatically check different banks and get you the best rates that it can find all automatically. I feature still has some bugs but it shows a lot of promise.
Disadvantages
- Didn’t know my credit card info like interest rate and total rewards.
- Misclassified a Countrywide Mortgage Payment as an Electronic Boutique Purchase.
- Still in Beta.
- Suggestions to save money section named “Ways to Save” needs work.
With all good things there are the disadvantages or the minor short comings. I plugged in my information for one of my credit cards and up to now it doesn’t know the exact interest rate or APR. Mint.com also tries to categorize all info automatically but still false short in this aspect as well. One of my mortgage payments was classified as a Electronic Boutique purchase but was then replaced by transfer. The suggestions to save money is still a major point but however still needs some work as well. I don’t want to be too mean because the web application is still in beta.
Conclusions
All I can say is try it out and see what you can get from it. It’s free and over round pretty good. Just remember that it is in beta still so don’t go by everything that it has to say without first thinking it thoroughly through. That goes especially for the ways to save money section.
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