by Adam Dawson
A little more on why we decided to pass on the mantel of Chief Blogger at Blogging Away Debt.
I mentioned previously that we have had a hard time keeping up with the schedule of blogging 3x/week. I think there are several reasons for this.
First, I’ve just found that I struggled more and more with having anything interesting to say. There were big changes we needed to make when we started this blog. Our spending was way outpacing our income. We weren’t making our snowball payments. We had to deal with our spending habits and understanding how far our income went with a new job and new house, etc. In many ways, we’ve worked through the big problems. We now are keeping spending in line roughly with our income. We have stocked our emergency fund with $5000. We’ve put our huge snowball payments ($3500/month) on auto-pilot. We are also saving toward our $15k large payment and contributing to my 401k.
Sure, we haven’t posted a full budget yet. I promise, we intended to. We just never got around to it. But we’ve spent the last few months focusing on the small problems. Gym memberships, eating lunch at work, which cell phone plan is most cost effective. These things are still important, but it’s just felt like I haven’t had anything interesting to say about it. Yay, I packed my lunch today.
Someone once commented that if we would just open up more, we’d probably have a lot to talk about. I think this was true at the time it was said. But not so much now. We could have posted a full budget, and tracked every dollar against it, week in and week out. But again, we’ve been more open in the last 3-4 months about the big decisions and financial events we’ve been going through and we’re getting down to the small details.
This is not a victory lap. As a couple, we have much more to do with our family budget. We have 22 more months of paying off debt and I hope we can stay on track. There are some desperate home maintenance needs and many other things we’d love to have money for. I haven’t met my newest niece yet and I’m missing a friend’s wedding next month because of finances. We aren’t finished by any means. But as I’ve said twice already – just not that much interesting to say about it. And if someone else finds these minutiae interesting, then by all means I hope Jeffrey picks you to be the next blogger here.
And so, we got to a point where we spent a lot of time stressing out about posting something new, and almost no time benefitting from the community here due to our infrequent posting and not-so-awesome topics. The cost/benefit got out of balance for us.
We also know that this site is part of Jeffrey’s and Nate’s livelihood. Honestly, what we’ve posted and when has been completely up to us, and Jeffrey and Nate have offered great support for our questions. It’s not fair for us to let this site wither on the vine and subsequently affect their personal income.
It’s not just the blog, by the way. I’ve had a hard time keeping up with stupid household tasks like paying bills, opening mail, and getting car inspections done. I currently need to update my drivers license with our new address, so my license can be used as proof of occupancy in our new house, so I can get our homestead tax exemption applied. To get a new DL, I will have to get my eyes checked and get new glasses, because my vision has deteriorated significantly in the last year or so. What a pain. I haven’t called my mother in like 2 weeks! What kind of son am I! Sheesh. I have some catching up to do on personal stuff.
Also, my new job. I am so thankful for it. I enjoy it. I get paid more and I love the people. But I am BURIED. I’ve been going to California every few weeks and my work days out there average 14 hours. Even home base work days are longer, and busier, than my last job, when I was keeping up with the blog better (while I was getting fired). And even though there’s a bit of income on the blog, I’ll obviously be better off to make sure I do a good job at my real job than make a few bucks a week posting.
Thank you for reading this novella. I wanted to explain a little about our decision to move on from the site. I am so thankful for what we’ve learned here but we weren’t really doing the site, the readers, or the owners justice with our posting. Here’s hoping that the next bloggers will be much better at it than we were!
I think there was the potential for plenty of interesting topics, more of the he-said-she-said posts like written on Emily’s saloon-visits would have been interesting. Or some topics suggested by the readers (“How to stay on budget on a cruise?”) that you just never adressed. (Maybe due to “Granny paying for all expenses” in this case not being too interesting / not being too helpful and relevant for others.) I wish you all the best for your journey & I am sure the two of you will pay off debt fast. Take care the two of you and also keep in mind what somebody else commented on the part 1 post: if there is not enough time for 3 posts / week, can there be enough time for a farm?
Wishing you all the best for your future Emily & Adam.
Omg, I would so come here to read about Emily’s saloon visits!
If they don’t get 2 or 3 different bloggers going at the same time, then I hope they just get someone with much less debt . I feel someone with say $15K debt will be much more likely to stick around till the end.
All the best Adam
It has been great reading your posts and seeing what you have been learning. I guess I didn’t miss not having three posts a week because I often only had time to read the blog once a week, so I do get the being busy part. Best wishes for a happy life and more celebrations as you reach your financial goals. Hope you get to meet your new niece soon!
Best of luck to both of you. I think you made a good first start at debt reduction. It sounds like you are on your way however I think you’ve just scratched the surface. I’d say you are about at 20% of the journey. I never got a sense that you wanted to put “everything out there” and without that, it’s pretty hard to move forward. I don’t think the three times a week is unreasonable at all…while you do have a new job, and those can be demanding, but you actually have it pretty easy in life right now…no kids, no hobbies, a wife who works from home, etc. Sounds like it’s more of a time management issue than anything else. I can’t imagine trying to take on the farm if you are this stressed from the blogging. There is plenty to talk about once you get the debt reduction rolling. Paying off debt and saving money is less about doing a few “big things” and more about doing a lot of little things that add up to a lot. As you found out this month, there is always an unexpected expense that seems to muck up the plan a bit; that’s part of life. Good luck in your journey and maybe you can give a blog post every six months with an update on how the payoff is going:)
I enjoyed reading your blog posts. Best of luck in your next adventures!
I second the comment that I would love to read big 6 month updates as well! Just to see all the progress you all have made!
I also find it very hard to blog everyday and find interesting topics to talk about. Best of luck with your new endeavor!
Good luck! and Jeff and Nate, I’m totally interested in taking up the mantle. I don’t think you’ve have a younger perspective on here so that would be great!
$3500 per month debt payment, not counting the $15,000 large payment contributions or 401k plan contributions, is an incredible feat. You guys will definitely make it.
Good luck to you!
This post still makes me feel like you guys needed to open up more. It’s not even about sharing all the budget numbers. That would have been interesting, but really it’s about sharing all those little struggles and decisions you make. Comparing cell phone plans – talk us through that decision. I recently did that and would be interested to know what you went with and why. I struggle with bringing a lunch to work – what’s working to keep you on track? In other words, tracking finances is great, but personal finance is all the interesting stuff. And I get it if all that stuff isn’t interesting to you guys. Not everyone thinks it is. And that’s ok too, but it explains why you can’t find topics for interesting blog posts.
I wish you guys all the best, and I hope you hit your debt payoff right on target or early!! 🙂
But let’s all go talk about tax refunds and adjusting our withholding and increasing 401k contributions and buying new dishwashers and picking contractors and debating new vs. used and haggling on large purchases and fitting the occasional frivolous purchase into your budget and all that “boring” stuff that people never want to talk about or get excited over.
You sound about as busy as I do! It seems like days off are even busier than work days as we are always trying to get things done for our families and homes. I just want to have a day off where I can do anything I want without having an errand to do or an appointment for work, car or health. I just started reading this blog and I am not sure what I am missing but I am sure that you have had a lot of very loyal readers. 🙂