The Museum Of Modern Thinking

I was replying to Neil’s comment on my recent debt update, and debt snowflakes came into mind, which is related to debt snowballing.

Debt snowballing is where you find an extra amount of money per month and add it to your minimum payment on the lowest debt / highest APR debt you have i.e. your new monthly payment on one of your debts is now the minimum payment of £150, plus your “found” amount of £25 = £175. You continue making the minimum payments on the rest of your debts untill you’ve paid of the £175 a month figure, then you take that £175 a month, roll in into your next debt’s minimum payment (£210 + £175 = £385) and continue paying that. The money you were using on that cleared debt “snowballs” into the next debt, and when that next debt is cleared, roll the £385 into you next debt, and so on. If you’ve only got a couple of debts, bully for you, take that snowball amount and apply it to your mortgage.

Debt snowflakes are the things that make up debt snowballs. These are extra bits of money which you use to pay off your current debt target. You can generate them by selling stuff on ebay, garage sales, charging friends for websites, etc. and then use them to further reduce your debt. They are far better explained by Get Rich Slowly’s post on debt snowflakes, which is were I became aware about them.

As previously mentioned, I’m posting my progress on paying down my debts and building up my savings. Thanks to saving 10% of my income a month, i.e. paying myself first, I have some savings - duh.

Total Savings: 19.85% of monthly income (will increase)

Total Debt: 10.32 x monthly income (will decrease)

I know it looks like the my total debt has shot up from last time (it was 5.67), but I did not include my car loan in the previous figure, which I really should.

With Mervyn King (governor of the Bank Of England) predicting the standard of living will fall, it makes sense to tighten the belts and get some savings behind me - as should we all.

I realise this is a bit of a departure from my usual posts (i.e. I’m not ranting), but I’d thought I’d share a rather useful bit of ASP.Net code I’ve been using.

When a user is presented with a GridView of data they can delete, it’s usually a good idea to give them a “Are you sure?” confirmation dialog using Javascript, like so:

<asp:Button ID="uxDelete" runat="server" Text="Delete" OnClientClick="javascript: return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete this record?');" />

(The above is an ASP button, to be placed in a TemplateField in a GridView)

Now that will give a plain “Are you sure?” message, but it’s a bit vague - what if the GridView has twenty-five, fifty or one hundred records displayed? Will the user be sure they clicked the right delete button for the right product / entry / whatever?

By some clever use of the Eval statement, the dataitem you want to delete and some character escapes, it’s possible to put an identifiable piece of data in the Javascript confirm call:

<asp:Button ID="uxDelete" runat="server" Text="Delete" OnClientClick='<%# Eval("ProductCode", "javascript: return confirm(\"Are you sure you want to delete {0}?\");") %>' />

Now, when the user clicks delete on an item, the name of the item will appear in the confirm dialog, reinforcing their decision to delete.

Another reason I’ve blogged this is to have it somewhere where I can always get hold of it - I don’t remember stuff as well as I used to