Blogging Away Debt Blogging Away Debt follows real people on their journey to debt freedom — with tips on the debt snowball, budgeting, cutting expenses, and staying motivated.

by Tricia

On Friday, I tried logging into my blog and I couldn’t. I would enter my login info, hit enter, and then it would keep redirecting and redirecting trying to get to my blog but it would time out. I wasn’t locked out of my site completely, but I couldn’t get into my blog.

I tinker, and I admit that I often goof things up when I tinker. Tinkering Tricia…that’s me. But I didn’t tinker this time and something broke. That meant I had no clue how to fix it. I hit the web looking for answers and came up empty.

This site has been hosted with Dreamhost ever since I left my blogspot.com address back in July of 2006. I’ve been very pleased with them. They have always been quick to answer my emails and in this case, they were really quick and really helpful. They found the problem (it was a plugin) and got me up and running again. I was starting to feel uneasy for a while there. This blog was hacked once before, and since I didn’t tinker before things broke – I was starting to wonder if it was hacked again.

I usually don’t do this, but I have to say…if you are starting a blog and want to host it yourself, look into Dreamhost. Their price is awesome and their support is superb. If you do happen to sign up for an account for them, you can save $50 by using this link and using code GIVEME50. You’ll save $50 and I make $47 (it goes towards my hosting costs). That’s the highest discount that can be given with a code. You can also see if one of your favorite bloggers has a code and you can use theirs to help support their site.

To Dreamhost – thank you!!!

And with that, it’s a little late now to write a regular post so I’m going to bed. I’ll catch everyone up on a few things tomorrow 🙂

by Tricia

While driving down the main highway through town over the weekend, I noticed something. There were many houses with things for sale near the curb. One house was having a garage sale. One was selling some furniture. Another had a truck and another had a boat. Turning the corner, there were a few more trucks for sale and another boat.

I think people are really feeling the pinch of higher prices, and in Michigan – the unemployment rate continues to be high here (in July it was 8.5%). I don’t think I have ever seen so many things for sale on the sides of the roads. Even websites for buying and selling seem to be flooded with items for sale. We are still on schedule to have a monster of a garage sale soon but now I’m wondering if there will be many buyers!

We are definitely feeling the pinch especially with our groceries. I haven’t found one thing that we normally buy that hasn’t gone up in price. The one type of cheese that we buy went up 50 cents. Eggs went up by almost a dollar. It’s tough to adjust to spending even less when we were trying to cut our spending to begin with. It seems like a big uphill battle, but I have hope we will make it work.