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One of the regular “snowflakes” that I have is income from my dollar round up (to learn more about snowflaking, go here). Dollar round up is pretty much what it sounds like…rounding up each purchase to the nearest dollar. Now, I don’t use a checkbook. Instead, I use Microsoft Money to keep track of all our accounts and spending. I’ve used it since I first got a job when I turned 16. I’m now 24. I don’t know how I could ever live without it.

Ok, back to my point. There are a lot of people who use some form of dollar round up. For me, I usually do it about once a week. All I do is sit down at the computer, track all my receipts for the week, and add up the amount of change it would be to round each transaction up to the nearest dollar. I don’t get all fancy. I usually just grab the calculator and go through my list of transactions, punching in the amounts. So if I spent $13.42 at the grocery store, I would punch in .58 cents on the calculator and go on to my next transaction. Once I’m done, I total it and take that amount and transfer it from my checking account in my snowflake account through my credit union (I can access this online so it is easy and instant). It may be as little as a dollar, it may be more. It really just depends how many transactions I’ve had since the last time I did the dollar round up.

This is essentially the same idea as throwing pocket change into a jar at the end of the day instead of spending it. Since we run on a debit card basis more so than actually carrying cash with us, I didn’t want to miss out on throwing our change in a jar. We do have a jar we throw pocket change into, it just takes a while to fill up. We cash it in about once a month or so at the coin star machine at our local Meijer, usually at the same time that we take our pop/beer cans back for deposit (yay for Michigan having 10¢ deposits). Last time we cashed it in we had just over $19 in change and $10 in cans.

So, that’s dollar round up. Now you know what I’m referring to when I say that I snowflaked $3.60 from dollar round up.