Gather Little by Little

Inspired by a post from PaidTwice, I thought I might share my motivations for blogging. Most of this information is also available on my About page, but in a more abbreviated format.

In November of last year (2006), my family and I were impacted by a earth shattering personal circumstance. I was out of work for an extended period of time, we were faced with getting behind on our debt payments and beginning to wonder how we were going to put food on the table. We ended up selling a number of our personal possessions to a pawn shop just to make ends meet. It was the most scary time of our lives. Our faith was truly tested.

There is a great Third Day song named Mountain Of God that says:

Even though the journey’s long
And I know the road is hard
Well, the One who’s gone before me
He will help me carry on
After all that I’ve been through
Now I realize the truth
That I must go through the valley
To stand upon the mountain of God

These lyrics are oh so true. We were so far in the valley we couldn’t even see the mountain, but He helped us carry on. We’re still in the valley, but we can now see the mountain. God provided, and caused a number of miraculous things to occur. We realized very quickly that the way we had been managing our finances just wasn’t going to cut it. We came to realize how important we as a family were to each other, and we developed a much closer relationship to God.

I started reading any and every personal finance book I could get my hands on. I also went searching on the web and discovered blogs. I knew about blogs, but had just never really read any. While in Sam’s one day, I came across The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I read the back cover, flipped through the book and purchased it. Little did I know the impact this book was going to have.

Around the same time, I found my first personal finance blog, The Simple Dollar. I loved Trent’s articles and the personal style he had. I felt I could truly relate. I then found Get Rich Slowly and learned so much through reading J.D.’s articles. At this point I was quit addicted to reading blogs and started adding more and more blogs to my Google Reader. Here’s the list of pf blogs I currently read.

Being a techy, I was also quite curious about the software these bloggers were using and about the whole blogging process itself. So I started a personal blog and started posting some articles on what I was learning around personal finance and how it was changing the way I managed my own finances.

I also spent a great deal of time reading meta-blogs (blogs about blogging) and primarily ProBlogger.net. I also wrote about cars, camping, etc. More than 75% of my articles were on personal finance though, something I loathed before now had suddenly become a true passion for me.

I ended up starting my own blog on personal finance. I had the perfect niche, personal finance with a Christian perspective. Although Christian PF had beat me to it. But I did it anyway. When all of this started, I decided to read the Bible from front to back. I read Proverbs 13:11 one evening and decided to pull the name, Gather Little By Little from this verse.

My primary intent for Gather Little By Little is to share my knowledge, learnings, good decisions, bad decisions, thoughts etc, with you the reader. My hope is to make a positive difference in your life in either your personal finances or even better in your relationship to God. My articles aren’t deep with financial theory, I don’t use complex math or P.H.D. level finance theories. My articles focus more on the personal aspects of finances: relationships, self discipline, determination, and struggle. I am pretty clear on what I want for Gather Little By Little. I am less sure on how successful it is going to be. But if it has a postive impact on just one person’s life, than it has served it’s purpose. I love writing, love learning, and love reading your comments, stories and perspectives. My efforts at writing the articles is only a small portion of GLBL, the rest is your comments and thoughts on what I write.

Share your thoughts on Gather Little By Little below. Be honest. I want this to be a blog for you the reader. So let me know what you like, what you dislike and what I can do better.