Changes to the Blog, and Some Updates

I’m excited to get back to blogging. I took an extended break to give myself some thinking time and to decide what I want to do with my little blog. My last post was in mid-October, but honestly, since the summer I was having to force myself to write anything. So I decided that it would be okay to take a break.

Keeping track of our money and managing our finances is my job, and I have been doing just the minimum. I’m frustrated with my budgeting system, my financial paperwork is disorganized and until lately, I was feeling overwhelmed and very unmotivated to tackle this problem. The last year was a very difficult one for me, and I struggled to keep up in a lot of areas of life, not just budgeting. But now I’m ready to get back to work!

In the next few weeks I am going to change my budgeting system to one I think will be better. My paper and pencil method works, but it is time-consuming. I want a better overall picture of our finances and an easier way to plan ahead. I’m thinking of trying this spreadsheet.

Plans for the Blog…

On the blog, I’ll be taking the role of “budgeting encourager” for all the people who struggle like I do sometimes to keep their budget on track. 🙂 There are tons of books and blogs and YouTube channels that teach people how to budget, so I’ll leave that to them and share resources I come across that I think are helpful. I’ll be blogging about how I am organizing our finances, what method I’m using to budget, and how well we are able to follow our budget. I’ll share some of our favorite family recipes to show how we save money by eating at home. Our garden is much smaller now, but I’ll still share what we plant and harvest and how we use it to stretch our grocery budget. And (my favorite part) I’ll show little things I do to make our home function better or make it a little prettier without spending a ton of money. I’m still working to declutter my sheds, so I’ll share my progress on that.

I’m scaling back my posting schedule until late spring/early summer as I am working part-time at my little seasonal job. But, I’ll be sharing a Savings and Goals Journal twice a month, and hopefully one other post, like a recipe or project. I’ll post a quarterly Goals update. My goals for 2022 are much different than my goals for 2021.

Sharing our budgeting successes (and non-successes) here on the blog helps keep me accountable. I hope you’ll follow along as I get things back in order.