Snowflaking for the 'Good of it"

On Wednesday I got paid by my second job. Not a lot because frankly the week before I didn’t work a lot. But it was just under $90 by a few cents. For a while I flirted with what to do with it. Originally when I put the goal of getting a second job this year on my list it was to use the money to pay down my LoC. And I have for the most part, if I got paid $180, $150 would to my LoC and the other $40 would go to other stuff, maybe $20 for gas and $20 into my What if fund.  So I was pondering what to do with my less then $90 dollars. And I had this desire to allocate it to something other then my LoC, a very scary feeling. I ended up ‘talking’ myself into just dumping the whole amount into my LoC instead of splitting the amount up.

 Yesterday I got paid from my full time job and before I started moving around numbers I did a bit of calculations. As I was leaving the office on my way to my car I started to feel less ‘strapped.’ It's was a completely psychological feeling but a dangerous one. I felt like I had ‘money to spend’. Today as I am writing thing I can tell you I am back to feeling ‘strapped’ finically. Don’t get me wrong I didn’t go out and blow everything I made. I did spend it, but on things like my vet bills fund, retirement fund, car fund and the list goes on. However after I dished the allocated money out (I get shift premiums which I never budget for because it’s a varying amount) I have $58.48 left. $10 I put back into my Emergency Fund because I took $10 out of it earlier in the week, so that left me with $48.48. 


The question becomes though what do I do with the extra money. 
This is the most dangers kind of money I think. It’s these little amounts that slip away from you. So when you get your T4 statement around tax time and it says you made XX over your normal pay which means to actually made $40,000 instead of $35,000 and you can’t remember what you did with that $5,000. It just simply slipped away; it’s the $48.48 dollar amounts that add up to that $5,000 you can’t remember what you did with.

This was my delma last night what to do with that money. In the end I decided to put it in to my LoC. But I did realize something. I feel like I never make any progress on my funds, I think I piecemeal my pay to much. I am looking forward to when my Xmas fund is done so I can reallocate it. Maybe it makes sense to dedicate one month and put all the money in to one fund and all the money into another fund when the first fund’s dollar cap has been hit. What to you think???

I am Melting....

I was trying to write this post in my head while I was doing stuff for job #2.  And to be honest I wasn't come out right. I am upset with myself the car slipped though my fingers. It turned out it was a great car in great shape and I complicated it.  I haven't found anything else yet. And time is running out, its getting desperate. I mentioned a while back that I pulled my credit score finally. Well its not so hot, its in the low 600's. I can't say I expected it to be any place else. I just wish it wasn't that low. I also know with out a doubt that even if I could afford to finance a car of any sort, I wouldn't get the financing. I have spent the last 24h being upset with myself and my situation. But its time to pick myself up and get on with life. I am brain storming other car types. I am trying to brain storm other car models that might be in my budget.  Basically I would like a car that's a hatch back because I play hockey and is good on gas. If you come up with any ideas let me know.

We are under extreme heat warnings, and when it gets hot I don't eat.  I just don't feel like eating. I am sure that the lack of food hasn't really helped my mood either.

I paid my Christmas fund back.

$35.39 snowflaked +375.93 = $411.32 current value of snowflake jar


I hope everyone is staying cool!

Sorry

Sorry I have been MIA.  My BF had a family crisis so last night I drive to PH (his home town) which is 1.5h away from me to see him! It was completely worth it despite everything that is going on I had a wonderful time. However I am tired as hell because I drive back and got home at 3:15 am only to be at work for 8:30 am. What I realized as I was talking with my friend on the way home was with everything that had happened I had not even done my May budget and tomorrow is Payday!! So I did that first. You will notice that my cat fund is down to $37.61, the vet wiped me out. So I have decided that I am going to continue funding my vet bill fund $100 a month, until I get it to a level I am convertible with. After lending money to my friend on Sunday and putting 1/2 tank of gas in my mom's gas big SUV I am left with $3.46 in my account. I have snowflaked that into my LoC. As for the monthly goals review. I will get to it later this week. Don't hold your breath it was an epic failure. I am going to have to come up with some other way to flash them in my face.

Any ways I am off to bed I am picking my mom up at the sleep lab tomorrow and I have to be up early, plus I really need to catch up on sleep.

Did I Make it to Under 30,000.00 on my LoC???

TD seams to continually be experiencing "higher than normal volume of calls" since I seam to always spend 20+ minutes on hold waiting to talk to an agent. As I type this I am currently on hold 9, 16, 20, 25, 28 min and counting. Honestly by the time that I talked to an agent the call only took 6 min.

This month I put in:
April 8~ $382.55
April 20~ $62.50 (GST cheque)
April 21~ $525.00
April 25~ $3.13 (lose change snowflaked)
April 26~ $4.97 (leftover from budgeted cell phone bill snowflaked)
April 27~ $1.63 (leftover from storage until bill snowflaked)
April 27~ $60.43 (slush money from bills account snowflaked)

Total paid: $1040.21

Daily interest for the month of April: $3.75
Total interest paid in April on my LoC: $112.79

This month I put: $927.42 extra into student debt

Current outstanding balance on LoC: $-30,067.67

This month I snowflaked and snowflaked trying to get my LoC down under $30,000.00, sadly I was $67.67 short of my target. But I truly don't think I could have done any more to get it further down. I am not sure if I am happy with the progress I made, since this month I put the largest amount on my LoC to date. Or sad because I did not reach my target.

When I called OSAP yesterday to sort out if they had been trying to get a hold of me, I also got some details on my OSAP. I just thought I would share them, since I thought you might be interested.

Min payment: $117.45
 of which $54.91 goes to pay the interest and $52.54 go towards paying the principle. How depressing is that! Interest is calculated daily. I  pay $1.40 daily in interest.

Weekly money Check-Up

As always thanks to MMP...




1. The most I’ ve spent this last week was on  Paying bills. Wow I am not sure if I am happy with this or not.

2. Today I am thankful for my mom. As much as she drives me crazy and she does, she is still letting me live rent free which is a huge factor in me being able to chunk at my debt.


3. Money can’t buy happiness. One free thing I did last week that made me happy was I played in the mother daughter hockey game that my old league puts on. I was the mom because my mom can't skate.


4. I will consider this week a success if I write out all the vol. dates for my Duke of Ed book.


5. My favourite TV show growing up was Blossom, save by the bell, boy meets world, Recess, ect... there are so many good shows to just have one!


*~*~*~
I have just done a lot of snow flaking and I hope I haven't over snowflaked. I hope everything clears in time for it to impact my line of credit. I am really excited about seeing how well I did this month. 

Weekly Spending Recap April 18-24, 2011

April 18 (Monday)
No Spend Day

April 19 (Tuesday)
$117.45 OSAP *budgeted already for

April 20 (Wednesday)
No Spend Day

April 21 (Thursday)
No Spend Day

April 22 (Friday)
No Spend Day

April 23 (Saturday)
No Spend Day

April 24 (Sunday)
No Spend Day

~*~*~
I have a few large cheques that are flouting around waiting to be cashed from my chequing account. However since its a holiday and the banks take time to clear these things normally they have not been processed. As such I have been terrified to spend any money for fear of over spending and mistakenly bouncing the cheques. I really want the cheques to clear through my account because I have a few snowflakes to process. But I can only do it when the cheques have cleared. So I know how much I have left to snowflake and to prevent me from over snowfaking. I hate writing cheques and having direct deposits go through my account. I don't like having my money on someone else's time table.

In case you were wondering: It would seam that two movies later and we are back to being best of friends. Its no wonder I hated roller-coasters has a kid, I live on one. Any ways I don't expect it to change anytime soon so we will have to wait out the ride until it comes to an end and I can get off. 

Weekly spend Recap March 21-27, 2011

March 21 (Monday)

 No Spend Day

March 22 (Tuesday)

 $2.50 cookie at Future Bakery 

March 23 (Wednesday)

 No Spend Day

March 24 (Thursday)

 No Spend Day

March 25 (Friday)

 $20.00 Korean BBQ

March 26 (Saturday)
$45.00 taxi ride to work (just found the receipt as it was put on visa :( 

$7.05 Tim's breakfast and lunch 

 $7.55 Go ticket to Whitby

$12.50 TTC tokens

March 27 (Sunday)

 No Spend Day


I ran to the bank on Saturday after work and snowflaked $8.53 and I deposited another $25.00 in to my visa bill. When my tax return comes in I am going to wipe out my visa debt!!! I am so excited about the prospect. when that happens I will redo my budget again so as to reassign the extra $50 I will have. I have the updated amount on my line of credit with out the $400 I put into it Friday night. So according to the bank my line of credit is currently $-31,275.25. I will update the side bar to reflect the number but not the green line. I only my green bars once a month. Only a couple of more days until  then but hopefully my $400 will show on there system by then. 

Good Bye Vacation Fund and Line of Credit Update

If you look to your right you will notice that I no longer have a vacation fund bar graph. I used up all the money in the account and shamefully dipped into my retirement fund account to cover the rest of the trip cost. This is  one of the reasons I decided to change the name of my general savings account to retirement fund so that it would no longer be used for 'general use.' Any ways since I have for the most part paid and this is the last major trip I will being taking in a while I have decided to get ride of the fund for now. 

I am  a little behind on my updates, I am sorry about that. I have great news I had planed to have my line of credit down to $-32,000.00. I have accomplished this, my line of credit is currently standing at $-31,965.95 which is LOWER than 32,000.00. How wonderful is this!!!

Recap of amounts put in:
Dec.31  LoC balance: -32,915.15
Jan 4 deposit: +30.00 (Dec. 2011, snowflake)
Jan 4 deposit: +200.00 (Dec. 31 pay day deposit)
Jan 10 deposit: +35.00 (Xmas money)
Jan 14 deposit:+28.64 (snowflake)
Jan 14 deposit: +300.00 (Jan pay day deposit)
Jan17 deposit: + 62.50 (GST cheque)
Jan 28 deposit: + 17.07 (Snowflake)
Jan 31 deposit: +400.00 (Jan pay day deposit)
Jan 31 interest: -124.01

END BALANCE: $ -31,965.95

The exciting thing is that I paid $2.11 less in interest as December's interest was $126.12 every cent counts! To the best of my knowledge the interest rate between the two months stayed the same. But until the paper work comes in from the bank I won't know for sure. The bank isn't able to tell me this stuff over the phone... sigh.

Oh and incase you'd like to know last month I put in $719.90 beyond my min. line of credit payment.

A Kick Start to Accomplishing 2011 Goals

Today I decided to kick off the process of the 2011 New Years resolutions. The first thing that I did was create a tracker for my Christmas 2011 fund. The second thing I did was create another tracker for my extra 15,000.  On the 30th I called TD to ask what my line of credit balance was. The lady was unable to tell me as the interest was not to be added up till 4pm on the 30th. So at 4:10 on the 30th I called up and the next personal I talked to also was not able to give me an accurate figure for the same reason. Finally today I called and got an up to date figure. My line of credit stands at $32, 915.15. This number however does not take into consideration the $230 (200 normal instalment + 30 from snowflaking) I put into it on the 31st. As such the exact figure should be 32, 685.15. I won't update the tracker though until I get a statement in the mail.

In other news it looks like the cold has jumped from on kitty to the next. Max started with it and now it looks like it has made its way to Salem

When Life Gets in the Way Episode II

On Christmas eve I noticed that Max (cat #2) was sneezing a lot. I don't know if you have ever seen a cat sneeze but it is really cute. However when boxing day evening rolled around he had become a lot worse and he was being very ani-social. That night we decided that he had to go to the vets. So first thing we did on the 27th was take him into the vet's office. You will notice that my Cat fund has dropped to $53. This is because the vet bill cost me $146.92. I am so glad that I started this fund, though I wish I had had more of a buffer within it.  In March both cats are going in for annual physicals. This will be min.  of $150 for each cat, likely a lot more for Max because he is likely very out of date for his shots.

To night since Christmas is completely over and I do not need to get anymore gifts I transferred the $100 from my Christmas fund into my vacation fund. My vacation fund now sits at $311.52.

I checked my chequeings account and it is currently at $455.13 which means that Ally have not taken out the cheque that I wrote them. This is a problem for me as tomorrow is pay day and I have no idea how much will be left in my account to snowflake the money. I am going to have to call them tomorrow as having money in this account completely messes up the system.

The Woes of Good Intentions and Bank Fees

In my last post I mentioned that was going to start a snowflake jar. So knowing that I had about $24 in my account by the 30th I strove to not spend anything till the end if the day. Or the next day (the 1st) because I knew I would be paid on the 2nd of December. So imagine my surprise after work on the 31st when my account went from $24 to $ -92.89 over night. I immediately called the bank and told the lady who answered the phone straight up I was up sent and pissed off. The lady was very professional and by the end over 1.5h call things were completely sorted out.

Your likely wondering how does one go from being in the black to being in the red over night. Trust me I wanted to know the same thing.

This is what happened: on my bank account plan I was only 'allowed' up to 15 transactions a month. However I thought this was at the bank/bank machine transactions. Well apparently it also includes online transactions. Needless to say I ALWAYS go over that number. Last month I did 55 transactions between moving money around to paying bills. This number is average for me, but because I was a student I never got charged the extra $0.65 for each additional transaction because on top of my 'everyday account' I had the 'student plan' except this expired at the end of this past month and I did not go into renew it because I am no longer a student. As a result I was changed $14.35 plus $2.00 passbook update. Had it only been $16.35 I might not have been as upset but $24-16.35 does not = $ -92.89 and that is a lot of money to be in the red!! As it turns out the night before (Dec. 29th) I was doing mobile banking and I was transferring money out of my chequeing account that I had put in for a 'just incase' but really belonged in my general savings fund. What we concluded was that there was a glitch in the system and on two separate instances it transferred out $100.00 . So between the bank fees and the extra $100 being taken out of my checking account I definitely ended up in the red.

The lady at the bank reversed everything and gave me back the $16.35 and in the process I signed up for a new bank account plan which gives me 200 transactions a month for $9.95. I know some people might think its money wasted. But I have 8 accounts with them and like I said I am always moving money around or paying bills. One of the ways I curb impulse buying is I never keep money in my chequing account. When I need to spend money I move it from my 'holding account.' The down side to all this stuff is that she said it would take a few days for the bank to approve the return of money and to reset the system online.

Now that a couple of days have passed I am able to start making official snowflake deposits.

What did I learn from this: Always keep an eye on your finances and know the amount of money in your accounts.

Monthly TD Line of Credit

It is the end of the month and time to find out what my student debt is at. This month I put in 150.00 +65.00 +200.00 = 415.00.
In total this month I put in 415.00. This brings my total line of credit down to $33,189.37. This means that in total I have put in $1,191.44. I am very proud of this number. I know that its not massive but it is a start.

Math:
34,380.81 - 1,191.44= $33,189.37


$415.00 is not enough to meet my debt repayment goals so how do I increase this amount. I have bee reading a lot of other blogs to get ideas. One of the blogs that I was reading had a 'snowflake jar' which puzzled me. So I googled it and came across another idea to help pay down my debt. The idea of snowflake finance is to put what ever is left over even it its only 25 cents in to your debt. So I am going to try this method. Actually I already did with my lay 2 pays ago. The money that was left over before last pay was almost enough to completely pay off the remanning debt to Dave. This made me feel really great! So I am completely on board with this idea. I hope that the $24 will be the first to go into my 'snowflake fund' aka my Student Debt.


What about you? Will you start a snowflake jar?