Photo by Susan

Hey everyone, remember me?  :)  The last couple of months have been a roller-coaster of emotions, setbacks, and newfound inspiration. 

I actually just wrote this entire article, had it polished and was seconds from publishing…only to lose it in a small power outage that turned out being my cat stepping on the power strip button.  However, I liked it so much that I’m going to try a measly attempt at doing it again.  No promises on how good this will be, but at least my auto-save feature is now turned on!  LOL.

So, I’m going to attempt to summarize the last couple months in a few simple bullets that will set the stage for myself going forward.  I’ll try to be concise here, but you know me. 

• I’ve been pretty much inactive for the last couple of months.  I can’t promise this won’t ever happen again, but I can assure you that it had such a negative impact on my financial status that I’m going to make every effort possible to do this on a daily basis going forward with very few exceptions.  (Yeah, just when you thought it couldn’t get worse…)
• I’ve had to clean up some other areas of my life.  Our diet and exercise habits aren’t exactly the best.  After my grandpa went into the hospital, it became a very good time for everyone to do some reflecting.  The wife and I have since been very good about eating a healthy diet and being more active with an exercise routine.  You could call it a new-year’s resolution if you wanted, but being a new year was simply a coincidence.  Now I’m feeling better, have more energy, and am actually losing weight.  (Yay!)
• So, now that we’ve got some good habits forming for about a month now, it’s time to expand efforts to other areas of our life.  Between time management (which is crucial and near impossible with a family of 8 sometimes) and finances, I’d say we’ve got our work cut out for us.  I’ve recently been reading up on how some of the other PF bloggers out there have been doing.  (CleverDude, FinanceAndFat, BloggingAwayDebt, PaidTwice, etc.)  It’s definitely motivated and inspired me again.
• All of my side projects have been on hold the last couple of months.  This has impacted my "web" income a little bit, but we had to prioritize our efforts and focus on things one at a time in order to do this right.  Health, family, job, etc. all came first…then the extra projects come along once those are in order.  I’m going to start considering this blog more than a "web project" though from this point forward, because of how closely tied it is to my actual finances.  However, that means it’s also time to monetize this place a little so it will at least pay for itself while I get things in order and get my other projects in line to help me get out of debt.

So, with this newfound energy and motivation…I’m excited to begin a regular posting schedule again as well as keeping tabs on some of your sites!  Definitely drop a line if you stop by so I can check out your site as well.  I also want to thank those of you who dropped a line with both encouragement and condolences the last couple of months.  It’s been very helpful knowing you were still thinking of us when it looked like I wasn’t also thinking of you.

With that, I’m off to polish the draft of the post inspired by memories and conversations with my grandpa before he died.  We’ll cya soon! 

-Mr Debtbeater