Sunday, March 14, 2010

A little blog remodeling

I did a good deal of thinking last week about a lot (my cousin's death included), and one of the things I realized was that I wasn't posting much because I had inadvertanly made this blog primarily about couponing without thinking about what else I may want to put in it.

So I may be changing a few things. I started with the formatting, and the name. My real goal is beyond just saving and couponing, though I still intend to do and post about those things! It's about retiring early (to me retirement means having the freedom to do what you want, which may or may not include working) and maintaining a quality of life that I enjoy. If I drop dead in 10 years, I do not want to have pinched so hard for the future that I didn't enjoy my time here the way I could have- so I am working to find that balance.

Things I'm thinking about posting are things like retirement savings- both tax sheltered and not- what kind of investments I look at, why it can be better to rent, basically aspects of personal finance that I haven't talked about on here but think about regularly.

As for the quality of life bit, that goes back to couponing a lot. One aspect of frugality to me is not paying more for something than I need to. $3 may not be a lot of money for shampoo or toothpaste, but I can get them for free, so why wouldn't I? However, if one product is WAY better than another, I'll pay the difference in cost, but I need to have reason. Like whole grain pasta costs more than the regular stuff, and deodorant that doesn't irritate my skin (Dove) costs more than the other things I've tried. I'm still going to get those items as cheaply as I can, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the quality there to save a little bit (provided I am saving a decent chunk, of course).

So, thoughts? It's going to be a little ad-hoc around here til I get the hang of this, but I'm going to try and be around more for sure.

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