Snowflaking....

I am guessing you have figured out that it isn't going so well since I have not been blogging. You assumed right! Ugh! I am looking over my bank account and can find enough miscellaneous expenses like eating out and spur of the moment trips to the store to cover two months worth of snowflake payments! It is incredibly frustrating. Such is life, though. A friend of mine calls this "when your life gets in the way of your life." I agree. The only choice is too pick myself up, dust my checkbook off, and start again.

After the first week taking Financial Peace University, I did manage to put away my emergency fund, and an additional $800 is in the savings waiting for me to have time to get my car repaired, so I am tucking it away to gain interest and so I do not have easy access to it in the meantime. The car is drivable-someone backed into it and left a scratch and dent on my door when it was parked. With the recent sickness in the family and hectic time at work, I have not had the opportunity to shop, plan, or prepare for anything!

My goal for May will be to pay the remaining $85 on the first debt on the list, and then pay the bills, and see if I can scrape the rest of the snowflake together somehow to go toward debt 2. If not I will not beat myself up, I did after all, create the Emergency Fund.

I made my shopping trip with double coupons to Price Chopper and saved $99.00, and did some CVS shopping and paid only $4 out of pocket, and that was the momentum I needed.

What I want to leave you with is the importance of knowing that sometimes we get off of our routine, and it is OK, some things are more important than Extra Bucks, and we can always get back on track when all is well again.

Also, in my urgent need to pay off debt I forgot to create an emergency fund first. Let me encourage you now to stop paying the snowflakes on your debt, and to start building an emergency fund. We started with $1,000.00 EF, but you can start smaller and work toward $1,000. This is so that when you have a bump in the road, like taxes, or sickness, or tires for the car, you are not building up the debt by paying for those emergencies with plastic.

Keep going!!! You are doing great!