I haven’t written much during this past quarter. It’s been mostly a time management issue, as I’ve been taking on more freelance work and spending a lot less time than I should working on my blog. Now that my daughter is walking, time management has become a huge issue for me on the days that I take care of her all day. I seriously don’t know how some of the bloggers out there do it when they’re balancing full-time jobs, multiple kids, and everything else that happens in life. I’m struggling to make time to write at least once a week.
My big issue is that I have a lot of ideas, but I’m having a difficult time putting it down in writing. I’m debating renaming the Extreme Money Makeover Plan and am not sure about the direction it’s taking. I suppose I should just write more often and refine it during the editing process. It seems like my motivation comes and goes and I’m just not doing a good job of capturing the opportunities when I do have spare time. I have to admit that I have been watching more television lately.
Before the end of the summer, my wife and I made it a point to clean up the house, organize the garage, and donate things we don’t need. As a result, we managed to donate two car loads of clothing and general stuff. This allowed me park inside the garage again, something I haven’t been able to do in about two years. I’m in the process of selling the things that have some value now. It feels good to reduce the clutter in the house, though it is still dominated by baby gear and toys.
Financially, we haven’t moved much. We’re keeping our heads down, putting money away into the 401(k) plan, paying extra into the mortgage every month, and adding whatever we can into the emergency fund. This cycle will probably endure for many years, though I am seeking avenues to make more money so I can pay off the mortgage faster and really be debt free. It is about time that I review my recurring bills and figure out how to save more money – something I plan to cover in this blog soon.
In other news, I recently switched my blog hosting over to A Small Orange. When I first started blogging, I used Hostgator. I was actually happy with the shared hosting service there until they migrated me to another server. The new server had really poor performance and slowed down my blogs dramatically, even though I didn’t change anything. When I contacted them, I became unhappy when they blamed the speed issues on my blog. At that, I decided to give Bluehost a try, as I heard a lot of good things about them from other bloggers. I was saddened to find that the shared hosting performance on Bluehost was worse than Hostgator. I even spent more money at Bluehost upgrading to their Pro service (and even tried a CDN service), finding out that the performance was still lagging behind the original Hostgator service I had in the past.
Realizing that “unlimited” hosting service will never live up to it’s name, I moved all of my hosting services to A Small Orange. Even though they share the same parent company, Endurance International Group (EIG), I have been extremely happy with the performance of my blogs and their customer service. If you’re a small blogger like me, don’t need managed hosting features, and are unhappy with your website loading speeds (especially with WordPress) at Hostgator or Bluehost, I highly recommend A Small Orange.
*Note: I no longer recommend A Small Orange for hosting service.
Talk to me, Goose.