Each snowflake is different, but mine is an honor roll student

Summer is a battleground between the need to be thrifty and the desire to consume ice cream until I vomit it back into the cone. While the extra hour of light during daylight savings correlates with a decrease in crime and car accidents, it also increases the temptation to 'expand economically' and party like hell.

I just want to eat out on the patios of restaurants all day. I'd like to grab some brunch, shuffle up to a late lunch, and lurch over to dinner. Afterwards, it would be nice to hit a bar. And I would never fail to have a milkshake in hand.

But alack! No can do. I have a few days until I get paid again and I possess but a pittance in my checking account. My money left my hands pretty early these past two weeks. I thought I could hold out, but when I hit the home stretch, my bike busted a flat. I couldn't afford to fix it and I couldn't come up with more than two days worth of train fare for a five day work week. Jessica came to the rescue wearing a mask and cape as she often does, acting as if I didn't know her true identity. But I knew. I knew! She spotted me the fifteen bucks to repair the flat which will be reimbursed from a hutch we're going to sell this weekend.

I gave myself a ten dollar limit to spend on food for the week. I bought some tomatoes, yogurt, and a pineapple. I kept under ten dollars by $2.84. That paltry sum was shuffled over as a tiny payment to my credit card.

Isn't that a neat trick? It's a tactic I picked up called snowflaking. Snowflaking is a debt reduction method by which you take a small amount of cash you come across and flick it into that seemingly bottomless pit of debt. It's kind of like throwing a handful of dirt onto a festering corpse. It might not seem like it's covering up that man you killed, but it builds up over a long period of time.

Cover that up with dirt and you won't have to marry it!

Snowflaking can actually be fun. It's not the same as painfully committing a large chunk of funds. The small, almost silly amounts that go into my debt can give me the mental boost I need to take this on in the long term. Because I'm constantly putting payments on what I owe.

That will hasten my debt's demise. And the sooner I pay it off, the sooner I'll be regurgitating ice cream and shoving sandwiches into my esophagus.