As I've stealthily crept into year five with this blog, the financial world is going through yet another nosedive. And while the stock market has basically gained zero ground during that time, I've been fortunate enough to have my financial assets increase considerably during that period through a combination of frugality, saving, and investing:
Unfortunately, there isn't much good news to blog about when it comes to personal finances. Even the Federal Reserve seems to think we're years away from seeing the economy pick up some steam. Not very encouraging... :(
In some ways, it seems like a million years ago since I first posted here on August 10th, 2006. During those four years we've seen the bust of the housing bubble, a near collapse of financial markets, and the "Great Recession" that we're currently working our way through.
My activity here during that time has become somewhat (ahem) less prolific, as I've been involved with work and family and the current state of the economy has resulted in far fewer nice financial deals to get excited about. That being said, while my finances are somewhat on autopilot, I do like to document my thoughts and progress here while occasionally sharing my experiences with various topics that I hope others may find useful.
For example, the project du jour at the Frugalson household is a redo of our dining room by adding some chair rail moulding, picture frame moulding, and some paint. It is a relatively inexpensive project (~$200 for materials) that may sound simple enough, but since it's pretty labor intensive my quadriceps are still sore from all of the squatting I did on Sunday installing the chair rail and a few picture frames. :) While it's lacking some final filling, sanding, and paint, we're looking pretty good so far with about 120 more feet of picture frame moulding to install:
So thank you for stopping by and coming along for the ride. Here's to another good year!
One of things that I find fascinating about blogging is seeing what route people take to get to your blog and what topics they are interested in reading about once they get there. Since I don't have a high traffic blog, I find that web searches (monitored with the free tracking tools at StatCounter.com) that pick up my blog to be the most interesting.
The most popular search path to my blog has always been grocery-related searches that lead to my grocery shopping strategy. I've also recently experienced a similar amount of traffic looking for information on the Scotts Turf Builder rebate that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
To a lesser degree, recent data shows people looking for information on:
This is pretty interesting stuff (to me at least) since it gives a blogger some insight into what types of entries drive traffic to their site. Based on recent developments, it would seem that I would be better off renaming this blog to "Picking up Groceries" or "Picking up Scotts Turf Builder". :)
While the total amount of money is small enough (< $100) to make many bloggers chuckle, it at least means that someone out there is actually taking the time to check out my blog. My thanks go out to anyone who stops by from time to time. :)
What I really need to do is to figure out how to actually get some Google Adsense and Amazon Associates referral income coming in. My blog started out with some good Google Adsense traffic, but that turned out to be due to the "FatWallet Effect", when my grocery shopping strategy was linked to. One step at a time I guess...
(chart courtesy of msn.com)
(chart courtesy of msn.com)
