Guess Who’s Returned!

Guess Who's Returned!

Hey everyone! If you read my last update about my little house in Guatemala, you know that I’m now back home. Actually, I’ve been back for a bit, but I’ve been super busy with our Airbnb guests. We hosted 8 people in the first 10 days, including my boyfriend’s aunt. On top of that, the lake levels have been rising and our water pump broke, so we were without running water. It was a hectic time, and I really missed my little house.

I wanted to get back into a routine, but it’s been a mixed success. During the trip, I really slacked off on physical activity. Sure, we walked a lot and traveling by motorcycle can be quite exhausting, but I stopped running once we got to Morocco. There were a few reasons for this, but mostly because the winter days meant the sun rose late, as late as 8am in France. Running at 5:30am in the dark was not appealing, and I couldn’t ask my boyfriend to wait until 10am for me to be ready. We ate out every day and had plenty of wine and sangria, so I definitely felt sluggish. Fortunately, my boyfriend bought me a new pair of running shoes, a cute pink t-shirt, and some comfy running pants. No more excuses!

Now, I’m back to running 8-10K three times a week. I can run for a full hour without getting out of breath and then have a refreshing swim in the lake afterward. It’s the best way to start the day with a burst of energy.

On the blog front, I bought another personal finance website, which has been occupying a lot of my time. The migration to my server was a bit of a disaster. There was a mix-up with Hostgator where they canceled my hosting plan, causing the site to go down. I had to migrate it back to the old server, then again to the new one—what a mess!

While traveling around Europe for two months, I tried to stay offline as much as possible out of courtesy to my boyfriend and to fully enjoy the trip. I had planned most of my posts in advance, and my wonderful virtual assistant kept things running smoothly behind the scenes.

Big thanks to the awesome bloggers who guest-hosted the Carnival of Financial Independence while I was away. I’ll now be alternating hosting duties with other bloggers, hosting once or twice a month myself, and the other weeks will be open to volunteers. You can sign up to host at bloggercarnivals.com.

I kept up with many of my favorite blogs by downloading and reading them offline when the internet was unreliable. However, I pretty much failed at staying in touch, commenting, or saying hi. I hope you’ll forgive me.

With my blogs on autopilot, it was easy to step back and just watch as I had before when I was just a reader. But one day, I found that there weren’t enough posts in the queue. Without a backup plan, I got lazy and hadn’t written anything new for a while, just like not running for a month and then struggling to get back into it.

But now, I’m back and fully energized! I’ve written about 20 posts in the past few days across the three sites I own and manage. I’ve also implemented a few new ideas to improve things, and I hope you’ll join me for the journey in the new year.

Reach Financial Independence will have 2-3 posts per week and remain my personal outlet for life updates, random thoughts, and achieving financial independence. I plan to resume the Wednesday guest posts about your journey to Financial Independence, so let me know if you want to be featured.

Make Money Your Way will have three posts a week again, now that things have settled down. One article will be about investing or real estate, another about side hustles and ways to make extra money, and the third about online income and blogging.

Finally, my Super Secret Website 3 will feature 2-3 posts a week on frugal living, saving money, travel, life goals, and self-improvement. The name will be revealed once I break even on the purchase, which should be in less than six months.

That means I have a writing schedule of about 7 posts per week! I already have a staff writer for the investing posts, but I want to keep my two other sites personal and interesting to ensure they keep growing. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve. Thanks for sticking with me through these busy times!

How is life treating you? Are you excited for the holidays or already enjoying them?