Photo by: rjs1322
It’s new years eve and almost the start of a new year. Since July of this year, I’ve written more than 200 articles and received more than 1600 comments from you. Next to my How to Get Your Finances Under Control, One Small Step at a Time series, I personally enjoyed writing the Money Saving Monday Tips the most. Since this last day of 2007 is a Monday, I thought I would recap all of the articles in that series.
Photo by: blmurch
My oldest son became a teenager last week and my 7 year old turned 8 the day before. My children are quickly growing up around me and it’s both sad and exciting at the same time. Today’s lyrics are from a song that has met a great deal to me as I’ve watched my children grow up. The song has served as wonderful reminder of the example I need to set.
The song? I want to be just like you from Phillips, Craig and Dean’s 1995 album Lifeline. I found a video that a wife made for her husband that uses the song as background music if you would like to hear it.
Photo by: ?ick Harris
It’s hard to believe, but this is the last Friday Gathering for 2007. This year has been a strange one, with the first half of the year seeming to take forever and the second half just flying by. I am looking forward to 2008 and to be honest, I am glad to have 2007 behind me.
Photo by: Gio JL
I started Gather Little by Little on July 1st of this year after having written various personal finance articles on a very simple blogger.com blog. I had no readers other than my family, but enjoyed writing and sharing my ideas immensely. Being new to blogging, I really didn’t have any set goals nor did I really know where I wanted my blog to go. I was just writing about two things that were having a major positive influence in my life: my faith and getting control of my finances.
Photo by: Kurt Magoon
As I write this article, I am surrounded by boxes, new gifts, and the remaining bits of wrapping paper. Our house is in a bit of chaos, but that’s alright, it was a wonderful Christmas both financially and emotionally. This Christmas was one of our best Christmases ever.
This was the first Christmas that I can remember where we didn’t rely on credit cards. In the past we would have used whatever spare cash we had to purchase gifts and then rely on our credit cards to pay for the rest. We seldom stuck to a specific budget and frequently purchased gifts for our children and for ourselves that were way beyond our means. This year was different:
See you on Wednesday the 26th!
This is a guest post from Randall at CreditWithdrawal.com. CreditWithdrawal is a blog about helping others get out of credit dependency and into financial freedom.
While researching another article, I came across a rather heated discussion about where the line is drawn when being frugal. Too little, and you’re not saving money, too much and you’re a Miser.
At that point, an idea popped into my head. “Is anyone really a Miser anymore??”
mi·ser
/’ma?
z?r/ [mahy-zer] –noun
1.a person who lives in wretched circumstances in order to save and hoard money.
2.a stingy, avaricious person.
Photo by: cmatulewicz
My favorite Christmas song of all time is Breath of Heaven by Amy Grant from her CD Home for Christmas. The music and lyrics truly make you feel the emotions felt by Mary as she walked the path towards the birth of our savior Jesus Christ. You’ll find the powerful lyrics below and here’s a link a short YouTube video featuring the song.
I have traveled many moonless nights,
Cold and weary with a babe inside,
And I wonder what I’ve done.
Holy father you have come,
And chosen me now to carry your son.
Photo by: My Wife
I am really enjoying my vacation from my “real job”. I’m getting some time with my family and my kids and gaining additional appreciation for what my wife does and deals with while I’m at work. The real fun starts today at 3:00 when the kids come home and start their Christmas vacation.
I’ve also had some time knocking out a few items on the ever growing to-do list for Gather Little by Little. Some various changes I’ve made in the past few days you may notice are:
Photo by: brykmantra
Ever since I rolled out my new theme, I’ve noticed that my RSS subscriber count seemed to flatline. I’ve been wracking my brain for weeks trying to figure out why, explaining it away to the holidays, normal feedburner fluctuations, etc.
I finally decided to ask my M-Network buddies for their help and plonkee found the problem immediately. Seems my fancy new RSS graphic wasn’t working in Internet Explorer 6 and readers couldn’t subscribe! That would explain it huh? I knew from one of readers (Rob) that the subscription count wasn’t displaying correctly in IE6, but had no idea clicking on the RSS graphic did nothing. I’ve changed the RSS graphic to a more standard format until I can figure out why IE6 doesn’t like my more fancy version.
