Blogging Away Debt Our Journeys to a Debt-Free Life

by Tricia

I have been holding in some very exciting news. I don’t like holding in things, but I had to make sure it was a done deal first, and I am excited to say that it is!

First, let me start of with a few things I’d like to say about this site. I started this site two and a half years ago and thought I’d have maybe 100 visitors a day. Scott Burns changed all of that when he interviewed me for an article for the Dallas Morning News. Then a few months later I was interviewed for an article in the New York Times by John Leland. My little blog grew beyond my wildest dreams and put me directly in the spotlight. Now, if you passed by me on the street, you probably wouldn’t have even noticed me. I’m the shy girl…the wall flower. I don’t try to draw attention to myself and when the spotlight is on me…the real me…I get very, very shy.

I almost pulled the plug on this blog after both media mentions. But I kept blogging. I thought it would help me break out of my shell a little bit. It has some – I have met some great people through this blog and many of them I consider my friends although I have never met them. I have read so many stories of people in the same situation that are glad I am blogging about our debt reduction. Those emails and comments kept me going with blogging and with our debt reduction. The conversations I have had made the world seem less small and made our situation seem not so bleak.

But being in the public eye has put a bit of pressure on me. I worried about my site breaking, I worried when I sat down to write something and I didn’t have anything debt related to say, I worried if I wrote too much personal information. I worried a lot. That is one character trait of mine that I wish would go away. I’m getting better with it, but I still have a lot of work to do. Blogging is also a lot of work behind the scenes. There are the emails to reply to (although I usually run behind with replying – I have replied to almost all emails received). Then there is the site maintenance to keep it online. I didn’t know anything about running a website when I started – that has greatly changed now. For every problem, I had to spend hours scouring the web trying to find a solution. Many weeks, my blog became my 2nd full time job.

I have received income from advertisers on this site, but I never felt right making more than minimum wage with it. In fact, I made less than minimum wage most of the time. There is potential to make a lot more, but then it would affect our debt reduction too much. I didn’t want the site to do that. I also never have the desire to have a career in debt reduction and write a book, in essence becoming a “debt guru” of sorts. I’m not a finance professional, and have no formal training in financial issues, so I don’t feel I’m qualified to do that. The one thing I was qualified to do is talk about our life and that is what this site became…our debt story.

Because so much of myself has been put into this site for all to read, I had made up in my mind a while ago that I would not continue blogging about our finances once our credit card debt was paid off. It was time to step away from the spotlight and be the wall flower again. But I still wanted the site to remain active without having the administrative duties associated with having this website. Then I received an email.

The email was from Jeffrey Strain from savingadvice.com. You probably already know of his website (that he runs with his partner Nate). In fact, since near the beginning of this site I’ve had a link that displays a money saving tip of the day courtesy of his site. He also is behind the pfadvice.com blog and you can see his name attached to many personal finance articles, even some on Yahoo Finance. They have a great site for people to work on saving money, but they were looking to have a place for people in debt to go so they approached me about purchasing my blog.

I have been approached a few times by individuals interested in purchasing my site. I even received a nice offer from one of them. But I didn’t do it. At the time, it didn’t feel right. I always had a dream that this site could keep going on forever with people blogging away their debt. Jeffrey shared that vision with me. Right then and there, the discussions I had with him became very serious and we came to a purchase agreement.

So Jeffrey and I finalized the paperwork, I received the funds and the site is now transferred to their servers. I’m not going anywhere right now, though. I’m still going to be here and I’ll still be blogging away our debt. The purple and green will still be here. The same ads will still be here. Not much will change right now at all, except the search will begin for a new person to take over writing on here (and earn some extra money!) once our debt is paid off. An announcement about that is coming soon – so keep your eyes peeled if you are interested!

I know what you are thinking…what about the money from the sale? I had to think long and hard about what to do about the money. We could put it all towards our credit card debt. I didn’t want to do that though. What I have decided to do is draw a salary from the sale for the months that I am still blogging. The exact details I will discuss in another post since this one is already becoming a novel and there are some updates to give regarding our income in general. I agreed to stay on here for at least six months, possibly longer if our debt is not paid off. That brings us very close to our original debt payoff goal date of May 2009.

It’s hard to put in writing how excited I am about this sale. I don’t think I could have asked for better buyers of the site. I am also very excited to no longer have the administrative duties associated with keeping this site up and running. I can focus solely on writing and get out many of the posts that I have been wanting to write and I’ll have extra time to work on our business, which I am really excited about as well. That means I can write that huge post on saving money on groceries and I can get some more monthly expense posts up (I brought those back only to start slacking again). Once our debt is paid off, this site will live on as I had hoped it would under awesome ownership – and I think that excites me most of all.

I hope all of you are excited as well and I can’t wait to meet the new blogger. I am excited for them because this has been an amazing journey, and all of you have been so supportive and helpful. I feel very selfish at times – I’m not sure all of you realize how much all of you have helped me! I don’t say it enough – thank you!!!!

There is more to discuss about all of this, including the particulars of the sale. I’ll talk about those details later. For right now, I wanted to let everyone know about this before I burst from the excitement 🙂

by Tricia

My husband just got back from a late night trip to Walmart. I haven’t been feeling well lately and I have had a headache for the past few days. Headaches by themselves aren’t too unusual. It was unusual to have it for three days in a row. My husband made the connection first – my headaches coincided with when we turned out heat on (which that date was confirmed thanks to this blog!). We both immediately thought about carbon monoxide poisoning so we checked the internet. Headaches can be a symptom of low level carbon monoxide poisoning.

The more we thought about it, the more it made sense. I work upstairs all day and carbon monoxide rises. I could have the most exposure. My son is out of the house for a good portion of the day and my husband is usually downstairs in the draftiest room in the house. They both seem okay, although my husband developed a headache earlier today.

We have a carbon monoxide detector in our home and it seems fine. But, we just found out that they should be replaced every few years. We didn’t realize that. Our detector is about 6 years old. So my husband headed out to Walmart to buy two carbon monoxide detectors (one for each level of our home). While we were waiting for him to come home, we turned our heat off and opened doors and windows to let fresh air in.

After he got home, we got the new detectors up and running. All is well. I think we’ll still keep the furnace off for the night, just in case. We’ll fire it back up in the morning and monitor the level tomorrow. One of the detectors he bought has a digital readout. I have a feeling it will be okay, and this was just a scare.

If you have an older carbon monoxide detector in your home, read through the manual. Make sure it isn’t too old. I feel a bit embarrassed about sharing this story, since we should have read the manual. But it’s a good reminder for everyone so I decided to blog about it.