I am proud to say that I FINALLY have my budget set to zero. I set up my Google documents budget to take account of all my expenses and then subtracted that from my salary.

At first I put in the minimum on every account to see what the difference would be. I ended up having some money left over if I put down the minimum on each account so I put in some estimated figures for things like:

  • Food
  • Gas
  • Electricity

based on the amounts I have spent over the last few months.

I then tweaked the expenses to put more than the minimum on each bill and increased the allowed amounts for irregular expenses. I also treated my savings like an expense because it is set up to be automatically transferred to a separate savings account in ING.

I did not include the income from the blog in my calculations because it is too irregular to predict. If I do get any income from the blog then it will be included at the end and will be a snowflake payment to be divided between credit cards and savings.

I am very pleased with the way the budget looks right now and realize that it will only take a few more minor tweaks in the future to keep it going.

I have payments set up in ING to go out automatically every month according to each bill. As my savings account grows larger it will be easier for me to make bigger snowflake payments as time goes by. I might even be able to do a large snowball payment and knock out a large amount of a debt at once.