One of my fellow bloggers, Peter, at Bible Money Matters, had a great post, Zombie Attack! Giving the Axe To Zombie Accounts, Subscriptions and Services. This post inspired me to carefully reconsider our monthly payments to see if I could eliminate extra expenses to come up with more money to snowflake, especially considering that I want to take some time to work on myself which means I won’t be pushing myself to work as hard.
I scrutinized all of our expenses and eliminated the following:
Cancelled Weight Watchers monthly subscription – $42.95 I was going to meetings regularly, but then when I began having digestive issues, I couldn’t follow the program as well as I would have liked. Add in a crazy summer, and I haven’t actually gone to a meeting since May
Changed bank statement to automatic to avoid monthly fee – $3.00 I have been paying this for a few months now because I was too lazy to make the call to switch. Now that I have, that is an extra $36 a year I have.
These changes will go in effect in September, so though they don’t give me money to snowflake this month, next month, I will begin saving $45.95 a month (or $551.40 a year!). I’ll apply that amount to my monthly snowball payment of $502, giving me a new payment of $548 a month!
Our Progress
I didn’t pay any extra over the last two weeks. There are expensive months coming up–I will be traveling to a conference in September, and we will be going to my husband’s conference in November, so we are trying to conserve cash now. In addition, if I can pay for my son’s dance class in full for the year, I will get a 10% discount, so I am trying to do that.
In the last 41 weeks since we have gotten gazelle intense, we have “found” $7,499.25 to snowflake!
How are you doing? Feel free to link up your progress.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks to the blessing of my new job, I was able to pay off the 1 major debt that I had been working so hard towards. Thanks to snowflaking, I was able to pay off this debt that’s been like a dead weight on my shoulders for the last 18 months. I am now down to 2 credit cards, and 1 will be paid off on September 1. My goal is to have the last credit card paid off by the end of the year, but I’m hoping that through snowflakes I can shave off a month or two.
Congratulations!!! That must feel great!
My girlfriend is doing well on her student loans and I’m paying the payments on the mortgage and my car loan. We actually recently wrote a post this week on our debt pay down strategy if you’re interested in checking it out.
$15,000 in one year on the student loans is amazing progress! Can’t wait to see how quickly the student loan debt is gone.
Thanks for the link recommendation – I’m going to go check out that post. It’s amazing that you were able to find that much extra money! But I agree – this is an expensive time of year! I’ve got preschool tuition, car insurance, and life insurance premiums on my plate in the next two months, plus an out of town wedding!