Today At Gather Little By Little, Gibble discusses his debt snowball and how paying off balance after balance gives him an emotional high that encourages him to continue.  The same thing can be said for the process of snowflaking.  That emotional feedback of building up your snowflakes and putting them to use for you can reinforce the process and encourage you to do more.

So keep track of those snowflakes and look at what progress you’ve made using them to meet your financial goals.  Numbers can be powerful when they work in your favor.

The Carnival of Snowflaking is up at Dreaming of Ferraris! Foxie did a great job of interspersing facts about actual snowflakes (the cold frozen kind) in her carnival. her two editor’s picks were posts I’d highlighted here before:

• Brip Blap: Wealthstreaming, Or Snowflaking For Income
• Five Cent Nickel:  Reducing Your Debt With Micropayments

Stay tuned for next week as the carnival travels to My Small Cents!  Get those entries in and thanks for a great carnival Foxie!

One of the newer blogs to the Snowflake Revolution, Waiting For The Great Leap Forward, has recently started snowflaking and shares how she started.  It illustrates a great point that is often overlooked - it doesn;t matter how you start snowflaking, just that you start.  Thanks!

If you’ve been thinking about snowflaking but don’t know where to start - stop waiting.  Just take some money, any money, and start.  You’ll be glad you did!

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!

Carnival of Snowflaking #3 was at Antishay Ventenne this week and included some great snowflaking stories and strategies!  The three editors picks were:

• Finance Gets Personal: My Co-Worker Debbie’s Old-School “Keep the Change” Program
• My Daily Dollars: Spending My Way to a Snowflake
• Pennywise and Pound Foolish:  Sell the truck, retire early
  

Thanks for hosting Shanti!  The carnival travels to Foxie’s Ferarri Dream next week so get your entries in!

Today’s tip is less of a tip and more showing snowflaking going mainstream. In the past few days, three “high profile” blogs mentioned snowflaking in one of their posts, either offhandedly or building their own spin into it. Check out these spinoffs and continuations of the snowflaking concept:

• Lazy Man and Money: Snowforting - Snowflaking the Emergency Fund
• Brip Blap: Wealthstreaming - Snowflaking Income
• Five Cent Nickel: Micropayments

Vive le Revolution! Snowflaking will be in the dictionary before we know it and will be a word everyone just knows the meaning of. Now to get these people to enter the Carnival of Snowflaking…

The Carnival of Snowflaking is continuing as scheduled this Thursday, making its way to Antishay Ventenne.  However, Blog Carnival, the service that collects the entries, has been having continuing issues for the past week.  If Blog Carnival is down when you try to submit your entry, entries can be directly submitted to the carnival by emailing them to snowflakerevolution at gmail dot com.

However!  To make things as simple as possible for the host, please include the following information with your entry:

• Title of Blog
• Your screen name
• Your email address
• Link to entry
• Title of entry
• Any comments to the host about your entry

If you do not include this information and simply send a link, it may be ignored.

Thank you for your continued support and interest in snowflaking and get those carnival entries in by Wednesday morning!

The second edition of the Carnival of Snowflaking is up at My Daily Dollars!  With only 5 entries explicitly tied to snowflaking, the carnival is short but sweet and definitely worth a read!  To encourage visits to the carnival, I’ll refrain from repeating the entries here, but mention that Snowflake Revolution’s entry about Income Generation Snowflakes was included.  Thanks!

Next week the carnival travels to Antishay Ventenne - get those snowflake entries in!

This week’s tip comes from Accumulating Pennies, the newest member of the Revolution, who reports on selling books on Amazon.  I haven’t used Amazon directly for this but I have sold unneeded textbooks through a number of different book buyback companies, and they provided me with many early snowflakes.

In the spirit of decluttering - go find some books to sell!

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.