When we started this blog, we were excited that we were able to pay off our mortgage in 13 years by being frugal, despite years of making mistakes with our money due to a lack of discipline, thoughtfulness, and planning.
Heck, those even apply to our paying off the mortgage. Christy is much more level headed than me and she was leery of wiping out our savings to pay off our mortgage, but after a little bit of math, my nagging, and her knowing that I wasn’t going to shut the fuck up about it, she went along with it.
If I had to do it over again, I think the wiser plan would have been to fully fund our emergency fund, max out our Roth IRAs for the year, put the rest on our mortgage, and pay it off over a couple of years. We were already on track to have it paid off in about 5 years at that point.
Of course, we may not have been able to follow through with that plan after I took a big pay cut at work months later. At least not have done that and funded our Roth IRAs until after the mortgage was out of the way.
Who knows, maybe it was the best solution. We were able to use the money that would have gone to a mortgage payment every month and use it to fund our retirement and savings.
One of the factors that helped us decide to just pay it off was when we figured out all the money we would have paid in interest if we kept it for 5 more years. I don’t have that information anymore, but I believe it was over $40,000 in interest.
Anyway, we were hoping we could pass along some of the common sense and frugal things we were doing, along with the mistakes we made, to motivate others to get out of debt and build a strong financial future.
I wish I would have had my current mindset decades ago. Maybe in writing about it, we could reach someone earlier in their life and help with them thinking of their finances differently.
But with over a billion websites, how the heck do you expect to get seen? Why, social media or course! But what if you loath social media?
While it killed me to do it, I set up Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts in an effort to get our site out there. To be successful, you really need to network.
I did try to interact some on Instagram, but I don’t know how people do it. I don’t have the emotional and mental energy to be posting content all the time. Especially in a medium that I don’t care for or understand the popularity of.
When I was using Instagram, I did get sucked into it for a little while, following feeds of bands I like from the account I created to promote my t-shirt designs. I guess Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg knew what they were doing. I am proud to say I’ve been Instagram free for over 6 months.
I haven’t given up on our blog, but don’t know how we are going to grow and reach people. I really don’t see how people can be on social media all the time. With 5 kids and a full time job, I have a hard time even writing a post a week. Having a successful blog must be a full time job in itself.
I guess it’s not all bad, because you can interact with family and friends remotely and have more insight to what is going on in their lives, but texting does that just fine and doesn’t lead you down a time suck rabbit hole.
So in summation, I think social media is a cancer in our society and I don’t think it is going to allow us to reach anyone. We’ll just have to rely on people stumbling across our blog and good old word of mouth.