Comments on: May Savings Snowball Update

By: Kayleen

Kayleen — Sun, 01 May 2011 16:07:34 +0000

Glad I’ve finally found sotmhieng I agree with!

By: Mike from Financial Freedom Forums

Mike from Financial Freedom Forums — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:05:44 +0000

I’ve not seen savings talked about in this way, only “debt snowballs” – I’ve got to say it appeals on an emotional level, you get to builds something for yourself while paying off debts.

It looks like you treat paying down debts and saving as two totally different snowballs – why don’t you combine the two? you could for put debts and savings in the same table with varying positions based on your priorities. Paying off a fairly low interest bank loan might take a lower place than building a good emergency fund, while paying off a crippling credit card debt would probably come above both of them.

Define your “minimum payment” for every target and go from there.

By: James

James — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:49:15 +0000

$10 a month for Charity and $5 for retirement seems a little backwards to me. For starters, I predict you’ll be able to grow, manage, and ultimately get more work out of your money than the charity. I think you’d be better served saving your $10 a month til retirement, then evaluating your ability to give to charity then. You’ll have a better idea of what is important to you, and a better idea of what charities can make that happen. What charities need out of 20-30 year olds is time and energy, not $.

All that said, I love your blog and think you’re doing an excellent job! Thanks!

By: hustler

hustler — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:27:27 +0000

This appeals to me because I have it in my head that I must save huge amounts of money at a time. 50 dollars to this goal, 100 to this one. If I don’t have enough, I kind of give up. You are proving that 5 and 10 dollars a month WILL add up. kudos!

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:53:35 +0000

“Snowball” and “one at a time” don’t seem to go together, to me. When dealing with a Debt Snowball, you continue to make the minimum payments on all of your debts. That’s what I’m doing here – paying “minimums” to most goals and throwing all I can at the goal on the top. When the top goal is totally funded, I move down to the next goal. (This already happened once – what you don’t see is that my Getting Established Fund used to be at the top of the chart, but has since dropped off because I stopped contributing to it.)

One goal at a time doesn’t make much sense to me, because some goals are too large to wait to start saving, while other goals are too soon to ignore. If I focus only on one thing for a long time, it will be years and years before I even have enough in my retirement savings to meet the $1000-$3000 investment minimum (at the firms I am looking at for my Roth IRA). Unless retirement savings were that one thing… but that would lead me into trouble as my brother’s wedding would come up before I had time to save for it! The system I have has been working well for me so far, excepting that I have to make adjustments based on my current income.

By: The Yellow Piggy Bank

The Yellow Piggy Bank — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:57:03 +0000

Have you considered applying the Dave Ramesy’s Debt Snowball concept to you savings snowball by focusing on one goal at a time. My friend has been toying with this idea recently, it may work for you too.