A Snowflaking Reminder

We are making very slow progress on our 2012 goals, at present we are more than $5000 behind on our goals.  There are lots of very good reasons for our slow progress, mostly related to Mr. Sam's certification classes and the costs related to same.  There are also some lame reasons for our slow progress, mostly starting late and not keeping day to day expenses in check.

I have two trips coming up in May, one unplanned trip for family reasons and one planned trip that I take each Memorial day weekend.  I budgeted for the planned trip but not, surprise, the unplanned trip.  So, I had a very expensive plane ticket, more than $600, and there will be additional costs as well.

So while I just paid our beginning of the month bills on my lunch hour, I debated as to whether we can afford to put aside money for our 2012 IRA goal at present.  Normally, I sock away money for this goal in $500 or $1000 increments, but there is no way we can do that this month.

So I pondered the issue for a few minutes and eventually went back to the lessons learned in 2007 when we were paying off $55,000 in debt.  And what is that lesson?  Every little bit counts.  When we working to pay off our debt, I would make multiple payments during the month, some were big and some were small (those small payments are known as snowflakes in the debt snowball vernacular).  The idea is to keep moving forward, keeping chipping away at the debt.  So, I took that lesson and applied it to our savings goal, we con't do $1000 or $500 towards the 2012 IRA today, but we can do $100.  And that is what I did, I transferred $100 to our 2012 IRA account.

Forward progress is forward progress.