Works with Emacs 24.

Configure user-emacs-directory

In init.el, set up user-emacs-directory variable:

(setq user-emacs-directory "/path/to/user-emacs-directory/")

Loading

emacs -l /path/to/user-emacs-directory/init.el

Git submodules

git submodule init
git submodule update

Snippets

mkdir /path/to/user-emacs-directory/my_snippets