by Adam Dawson
Some readers have noticed that our posts have become shorter and less frequent. We’ve just had a hard time keeping up with the required schedule of blogging here 3 times per week. And so, it was this week that I emailed the site’s owner, Jeffrey, and suggested he’d be better off to find someone who could keep up with the schedule on this site and display a bit more passion for the task.
Jeffrey was very understanding, given that we have not only missed several scheduled blog posts, but also left him with the task of finding a replacement just 9 months after we started. We want to say thank you to Jeffrey and his colleague Nate for the opportunity to blog here and learn from the community of readers and supporters.
Even though we won’t continue blogging here, we have learned a LOT from the community in the last several months. First, we gained a TON of tips for managing our spending day in, and day out. Many people encouraged us with ways to save money on household expenses, car maintenance, groceries, eating out, entertainment, etc. We are extremely grateful for those who taught us some things about owning a house since we just bought our first home together in 2013.
We also learned a lot about being creative with our finances. I especially enjoyed discussing do-it-yourself projects with the readers, and Emily and I LOVED those who discussed with us about how to tastefully, creatively, and naturally decorate our house for Christmas without spending a ton of money. We had a beautiful Christmas with our family in our new house and Emily knocked the decorations out of the park on a very tight budget.
Ahhh, the CAR MAINTENANCE. This has killed us over the last few months. We definitely learned not to have rotors turned, and to definitely keep up with scheduled maintenance like oil changes because missing these things can have expensive consequences.
We learned to provide a proper shelter for our GOATS and chickens. The goats appreciate their hay-lined lean to during our infrequent rainstorms now, which I built out of $5 pallets and a leftover tarp. Good news – our female is officially expecting! We think she’ll kid within 3-4 weeks. We are hoping we don’t have to “assist.”
We really, really appreciated learning how different married couples and families arrange their budget. Budgeting as a single person is probably much easier, but agreeing with a spouse and keeping discipline to an agreed upon plan is much much harder. We still haven’t conquered this beast but I can promise you that we read every single comment and anecdote about how you’ve done it.
There is much, much more we’ve learned in our 9 short months on this blog. You’ll hear from Jeffrey about finding the next blogger, and we will fill in over the next few posts to wrap up our time here. We are going to continue on our debt payoff plan and still intend to be debt free by the end of 2015. We are not giving up debt payback. Just writing about it!
Thank you to all the readers who have supported us in this last year, and thank you for reading!
