A Year and a Half Later…

If you regularly checked this page (and I don’t know that anyone does), you might wonder if I gave up on writing it.  After all, it’s been over a year and a half since the last post was published.  And while this post will show that obviously I’m still writing, there’s more to be said than just that.

So, 18½ months later, what’s going on?  Where did I go?  How am I doing?  Does anyone care?  The answers to most of those questions will follow.

So why did I stop writing?

I stopped writing for multiple reasons.  First of all, life happened.  Yes, it’s a lame excuse, but it’s true…although that goes hand in hand with the fact that I’m still not managing my time well.  Those people who follow me on Twitter may recall that my pinned tweet speaks to this point:

Good morning all! Another day, another battle with my time management skills. Praying for a win on that front today.

— Dads and Dollar$ (@Dads_AndDollars) January 16, 2019

Now, definitely please don’t get the idea that everything that took away from my writing fell under bad time management.*  I am, after all, a dad, and in addition to spending time with each of my kids, I (or my wife) am often transporting one or more of them to whatever activity they have going on.  (And, of course, there have been more activities since a lot of the Covid restrictions went away.)

And, of course, the 9-5 is still there, keeping me not only busy during the day but also rather worn out in the evenings.

One of my constant companions ever since I’ve had this blog has been writer’s block.  I’d say it’s a combination of not knowing what topics even are worthwhile at this point and doubting whether anyone wants to read what I have to say.

And then my computer died.  Your mileage may vary, but for me, writing a post on a phone is not easy or fun.  For that matter, using a laptop isn’t much better, as far as I’m concerned.  We spent way too much time trying to get the desktop working again; eventually, though, we finally had to replace it.

It didn’t look quite as bad as this, but the result was pretty much the same.  Photo by Md Riduwan Molla on Unsplash. 

And then, last month, the vehicle I won got rear-ended.  This has brought new doctor visits, as well as the undesired (and currently ongoing) excitement of buying a used car after learning that the other guy’s insurance declared my car a total loss.  Oh, and, of course, there’s the added time and stress of dealing with our local light rail system.

But there was another reason I didn’t necessarily want to write about chasing financial independence:  we’ve gone back into debt.

On Debt and Shame

Admitting that we’ve gone back into debt brings with it a rather unhealthy amount of shame, at least as far as the FIRE community is concerned.  We went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University (twice!), so what are we thinking?

Well, we thought several things:

• We needed the medical care.  (Multiple occasions in the past year…I’ve addressed some part of this before.)
• We needed two working vehicles.  (My vehicle was starting to show its age before I got rear-ended.)
• The children needed activities, if for no other reason than to maintain their sanity.
• Our need to eat doesn’t stop just because prices have gone way up.  (And our youngest is quickly reaching the age of wanting to eat everything in sight.)

But that’s not the issue, is it?  The real question is, what are we going to do about it?

Our New Debt Journey Begins

The first step on our debt journey, of course, is reducing what we’re spending, and so we have been cutting back.

The first cut has been eating out.  We never did eat out a lot, but we’ll be reducing what little we have been doing quite a bit more than we already have.

After that?  I think 2023 will have to be the year we finally purge the house.  We’ve put this off long enough.

And I suppose I will hopefully make more with my main side hustle** this year.

Anyway, to make a longer story, well, a little longer: it’s going to be a long, hard slog to get back to where we were a couple of years ago.  I will take all the encouragement I can get on this front.

One More Thing…

As long as we’re mentioning shame…well, not having written on a blog – or at least a blog I wanted to keep alive and am paying for – for over a year is rather embarrassing to me.  But let’s be real here: in such a circumstance, I had two options.  One was to write something; the other was to let this blog die.  That you are reading this should give some indication as to which option I chose.  Hopefully the next post comes before 2024.

* Some of it definitely did, though, including several evenings in which I tried to write this very post.
** You may recall that I’ve been rather tight-lipped about what that side venture is. This truth will not change in this post.
Note: this post may contain affiliate links.  And honestly, it probably does. View my affiliate link disclaimer here.