Blogging Away Debt

The Laptop Adapter Didn’t Survive After All

A little over a month ago, an unexpected phone call and my nature to answer that call as quickly as possible resulted in a mutilated laptop adapter plug. I brought out some tools and I thought I fixed it. Instead, I just gave a little more use time for there was hidden damage done.

The little prong that inserts inside the laptop broke off at the tip today. There is no hope of repairing that. I have to bite the bullet and purchase a new adapter. They run around $80 so I was not happy.

Looking around the internet, many places were sold out of the adapter at the moment. Since the laptop holds my Quicken and financial information, that’s not good. Luckily, I was working on reports for posting on here so I know exactly where we stand at the moment. I will be fine without looking at our finances for a few days. After some searching, I did find them in stock at Amazon.com. It was a few dollars more than other places, but I trust shopping there.

When I went to checkout at Amazon, I was offered a free three month trial of Amazon Prime Membership. That meant that I could get overnight shipping for $3.99. Awesome! Shopping at Amazon will actually cost less due to the reduced shipping costs. Now, I have to remember to cancel the membership or I will be charged $79 for it (yikes!).

This spending is not a great way to start February off, but at least the adapter went kaput while my husband has his temp job. If it happened in March we may have had to put the adapter on the credit card and would not have been able to pay it off. That would have been bad. Very bad.

No More Green and Purple!

by Tricia

For the past month or so, the look of my blog was getting to me. I liked the green and purple, but it wasn’t fitting me. So many of my thoughts are within this blog, some that I wouldn’t even tell good friends. I want my blog look to reflect who I am and how I’m feeling.

With the green and purple theme, I think it showed a lot of hope and a lot of ambition. The color combination was very bold. I looked at my site and I said, “You know what, I want to pay off some debt today.” So, the theme did fit me.

Now that a year has almost passed, I feel more confident in what I am doing since we’ve already paid off a large chunk. I think what I needed most during the first year was to make as huge of a dent in our debt as I could. I am very happy at the result.

This year, I still want to pay off our debt, but the progress may not be as fast. With our income decreasing, we really have to grow as individuals. We have to be open to new possibilities and believe in ourselves to make things happen.

The theme that you see now is one that I found and then modified to fit what I was looking for. It is a cleaner look, with winter colors (right now it is negative 10 degrees out, so the blue is very fitting ;)). The look, to me, is one that is more established and ready to move forward with our lives.

With recently putting in our first contribution to a 401(k) plan, it’s fitting that we are now also thinking forward instead of looking behind and working to create past money management mistakes. There’s also those little calendar like looking dates. That is a reminder that while the debt reduction has slowed down, there is still a goal date to meet of May 2009.

Now, for the new features…

On the left hand column, you will see that there is a section for the posts that I wrote with the most comments (aka popular posts). There’s also a recent comments section and a top commenter section. Jen – you are leading the pack! 😉

Since I tweaked this template, it is very possible that some things may not work. I tested the template as much as I could and things appear to be fine. If you happen to find something that looks weird or encounter something that doesn’t work, please let me know.

Lastly, I hope you like the look. Feel free to share your thoughts.