What do debt and training have in common

My husband and I are debt free, except for our mortgage. We followed Dave Ramsey’s baby steps to accomplish this. If you haven’t heard of Dave or his baby steps, you might have heard of the debt snowball at least. You can read more about how it works here. Basically you take all your debt and order them smallest to largest. You throw all of your money at the smallest debt, paying only minimums on the others, and when the smallest debt is paid off, you snowball that payment and the minimum payment you had at the next payment. The amount of money you have to pay off debt gets larger and larger with each one you conquer until they’re all gone. This is called a debt snowball, keep reading to learn about the training snowball.

Rice and Beans

Now the other trick to this is that you live on “rice and beans” and “beans and rice” until you’ve paid off your debt. You don’t go out to dinner, you don’t travel, you don’t buy those new jeans, you don’t have cable, or a fancy cell phone. After you make sure you have electricity, water, and a roof over your head, you put everything on your debt. 

You might be thinking, “the title of this post is training snowball, why are you talking about debt?”

Well I’d like to think you can treat time like money, and apply the same principles to your animals’ behaviors as you do to your debt. 

The training snowball steps 

1. List five behaviors you are working on. These are your debts. 
2. Put them in order, the behavior that is closest to completion is behavior #1 (this is your smallest debt). 
3. Decide how much time you can commit to training. This is how much money you have after you take care of your essentials. 
4. Decide what the minimum amount of time is to maintain the current state of the behaviors. This is your minimum payment for each “debt”. 
5. Subtract your minimum payments from your total amount of time you have after you take care of your essentials. 
6. Pour whatever time is left in to behavior #1 which still making your “minimum payments” on the other behaviors. 
7. Once behavior #1 is complete, decide how often it needs to be worked in order to maintain it. Maybe you can you pass it off to someone else so you can give that time to behavior #2? 
8. Keep snowballing your time until all your behaviors are complete! 

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Training Snowball Worksheet (1692 downloads)

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