The Impact of Snowflakes

You might be asking yourself right now what snowflakes have to do with getting out of debt. Snowflakes are any money that comes in that you were not expecting throughout the month. This could be from selling things on eBay or Craigslist, having a garage sale, doing surveys, picking up extra jobs, money that was budgeted but not spent, etc. I am about to show my snowflakes for the last few months and I think this will amaze you. All of this extra money should be put towards whatever step you are on in the baby steps. Right now we are on step 0, which is getting caught up on all of your bills. We are almost caught up but with Christmas around the corner they may not be completely caught up until January. Then we can start on step 1 the $1000 baby emergency fund.

September 2009 Snowflakes

$30 from Chase Leisure Rewards
$150 unexpected child support payment
$37 from rolling coins
$5 found doing laundry
$4.69 profit from BeautiControl sale
$5.01 payment from Half.com
$100 fiance won contest at work
$29.98 canceled two monthly subscriptions at $14.99 each

$361.68 Total Snowflakes for the month of September!

October 2009 Snowflakes

$150 from helping my dad with a painting job
$8 Chase Leisure Rewards
$330 fiance cashed in vacation pay
$2179.69 insurance check for fire
$6.26 secondspin.com
$4.20 kgb text answering service
$47.45 eBay sales
$29.98 canceled internet on both cell phones at $14.99 each

$2755.58 Total Snowflakes for the month of October!

November 2009 Snowflakes (So Far)

$380 helping my dad with a painting job
$5 won Wendy's gift card at work
$517.80 refund from Directv
$50 visa gift card for winning employee of the month
$50 fiance received for his birthday

$1002.80 Total Snowflakes So Far for November

As you can see we have found $4120.06 in snowflakes since the beginning of September. I know we had a couple of large snowflakes but as you can see all of this little money adds up. Now I will tell you a little bit about some of these snowflakes.

If you have a Chase checking account, stop in to your local branch and sign up for the leisure rewards card. It costs $25/year, but you earn much more than that back. As you can see I earned $38 so far since September and will be receiving $15 any day now.

As for the $150 unexpected child support payment, my ex-husband agreed to pay for all of the kids medical bills, dental insurance, and any other needs that come up if I agree not to take him back for more money, which I can do. Their dental insurance comes out of my paycheck because he does not have that option where he works and he reimburses me for this. I also add any copays for doctor visits, prescriptions etc. The thing is he pretty much pays me for this whenever. Right now he owes me $155. I never know when I am going to get it so I don't budget for it and when I do get it I count it as a snowflake. If he really starts slacking more in paying me back for these I will ask for more child support and I will get it. But for now I will try not to cause the drama unless it is necessary.

My dad works full time as a truck driver, but also does work for some office buildings when they need painted. He had a huge job and needed the help and I was happy to do it for some extra cash. Now that that job is done I need to find another way to make that kind of extra money.

kgb is a text answering service. You can text them a question at 542542 and they will send you an answer for a fee of course. I occasionally jump online and answer some texts for them although I have not done that in a while because the pay is not great. I did make $50 one month but worked at least 10 hours to get that. But if you are interested you can go here: http://542542.com/agent.

The two biggest snowflakes we had are the insurance check and the Directv refund. We had a small fire in our house and that's what the insurance check was for. We did not have to replace the items lost right away so elected to use it to catch up with our bills instead. The Directv refund is from them charging my debit card last month for the boxes we had until they got them back. We were not expecting this money so soon because they said they were going to send us a check in 6-8 weeks, but I guess we yelled enough about this because they ended up refunding my card.