When my spending was a little less tightly reined in, I frequently fell victim to the seduction of impulse shopping. I never meant to by things not on my list, but I would be in a store, something would look good, and it would end up going home with me. Nothing huge, but little things, as illustrated time and time again, do indeed add up.

I developed a small hack for myself to keep my impulse spending in check. This basically required me to pay for anything I bought on impulse twice - once with cash when I bought it, and then when I got home, I would make a credit card payment in the exact amount of that impulse purchase. If I wanted something bad enough to pay for it twice, I figured I could get it. This, combined with stopping going to stores just to see what they might have on clearance (I still miss you Target!) really reined in my impulse spending and put me on track to a better financial future.

But the flip side of that coin is that all that paying twice? Was a source of snowflakes to help whittle down my debt total even faster than I did originally. Now that my credit card is paid off, and I am focusing on our student loan, I have fallen out of the paying twice habit. But paying twice for impulse buys can still be done to a loan you can’t pay to as frequently as you want - it just involves putting those snowflakes into a savings account designated for the purpose first.

So if you have an impulsive side, harness that side for good. Use it to generate snowflakes for yourself to meet your saving, debt reduction, or investment goals. You’ll be surprised how quickly they add up!

This past week, our 22 year old furnace started to show its age and quickly demonstrated that it is not much longer for this world. We have been diligently using snowflaking to pay off our debts, and this threw a wrench in those plans. At first, I thought to myself that we would have to go deeper into debt to replace the furnace, for we only have a $1000 emergency fund, and a furnace is minimum several thousand dollars. But then I stepped back and started using that snowflaking mentality to figure out what could be done in a short period of time to avoid new debt, and I was surprised to determine that I think this can be done, and done well.

What has worked in my favor is that through becoming a snowflaking aficiando, I have worked hard at establishing multiple streams of income to provide those snowflakes. I have multiple small sources of income that I have developed, through things as varied as referral bonuses, surveys, tutoring, teaching taekwondo, blog advertising, and more, and each of them, while small in themselves, add up to a significant amount together. And that is what the snowflake mentality is all about. I didn’t get to this point all at once. I started with one, and added another and another over time, so that now, almost a year later, I can count on 8 or 9 different sources of income in any given month. And this gives a lot more flexibility not only for paying down debt, but in addressing unexpected expenses. And in the future, I hope to use this same mentality to kickstart out savings goals and really make a difference in our financial security.

Little things add up to big changes. Don’t overlook a potential point of growth - let your income slowly build up to great things.

Debt is the most common snowflake target discussed, but in reality there are many many things we can be snowflaking our extra pennies to. What is your snowflake target? Debt? Savings? Investments? Fun?

And what specifically is your target? If debt, what debt, and why? If savings, what are you saving for?

Let’s see how many different types of snowflakes exist out there!

Our current snowflake target is my spouse’s student loan debt. Leave a comment with yours!

How can we get snowflakes out of our budgets?  One way is to look at our variable categories and determine where we’ve saved money.  The savings over the course of the month can become snowflakes at the end of the month.  For example, if your grocery category is $300 per month and you spend $268, you can take that $32 in savings and apply it as a snowflake at the end of the month.

I choose to do my budget snowflakes a bit differently.  I tend to have a few categories that come in under each month, and a few categories that come in over.  Not the same categories every month, or I would adjust the budget for those, but every month something is under and something is over.  So for me, I look at how much my entire month is under budget, and I use that as my monthly budget snowflake.  I call that my surplus.  Whatever my surplus is for the month, that gets applied to my debt the next month as an extra snowflake.

What ways do you use your budget to find extra snowflakes?

Because literal snowflakes are small, there is a misconception that financial snowflakes are always small too. They of course can be, but they definitely do not have to be. Often when one falls into a large windfall or any other unexpected income, it is treated differently than a small amount, and the first thought is how to spend or otherwise use this large amount over and above normal spending. But this doesn’t have to be the case. A large amount can be applied to our financial goals as simply as a small amount can be, and in fact, will make an immediate noticeable difference in interest earned or interest reduced (depending on which side of the debt/savings coin we are working on) and can be a major motivator all on its own.

When my spouse was given a substantial (to us) amount of money by his parents as part of an inheritance his father received, a lot of things went through our minds as to what we could do with it. We came up with a lot of ideas, but in the end, we decided to stick with our original plans for all additional and unexpected money, and snowflake the vast majority of it to our credit card debt. That $1000 windfall ended up being the motivation and push we needed to finish off the rest of our credit card debt once and for all. Not that we wouldn’t have paid it all off without that windfall, but reducing our debt by a significant amount at once gave us a lot of positive reinforcement that made the goal seem immediately achieveable.

Don’t neglect the big snowflakes.  Use those opportunities to give a huge kickstart to your hopes and dreams.

On Mondays, I will be running an original post from either myself or a Revolution member involving snowflaking in some way, shape, or form - from ideas, to implementations to thoughts about methods or anything else imaginable. If you are a Snowflake Revolution member and have a topic you’d like featured, contact me!

For snowflaking to be effective, it needs to be frequent. There are different levels of frequency of course, and different abilities at different times. Sometimes snowflakes can fall like a light flurry, and sometimes they create a blizzard. But why many times, people get frustrated with snowflaking or don’t see progress being made, is because of the frequency. Small amounts do add up, but one snowflake a month is simply, one snowflake. If a single snowflake falls, most people don’t even notice it, and it melts before it builds up to anything significant. This can be said for financial snowflakes as well. If you make a $2 overpayment to your credit card once a year, you’re not going to see any difference at all. That’s an extreme example, but it illustrates the point that small amounts do add up, but the emphasis is on the plural “amounts”.

Make sure that you’re considering the frequency of your snowflaking when evaluating your overall progress. If you do not have the ability to snowflake frequently, track the total amount over a longer period of time to see progress. Each extra amount does make a difference, but the smaller the amounts, the more of them added together it will take to feel a satisfying change in your financial position.

Don’t let frequency be your enemy. Try to find one way to add more frequent snowflakes to your pile, be it a small source of alternative income, a continuing way to be frugal, or another place where you can find a snowflake in your budget that can recur over time. Just make sure to keep your snowflakes classified as snowflakes!