What's Going On at Saving Toward A Better Life?

Happy New Year! Wow. 2025? I remember ringing in 2000. I’m so old. I felt like it was a good time for an update because things have been different around here and hopefully 2025 is going to bring some good changes. I have definitely not posted as much the last few months and I really didn’t post as much around Christmas as I normally do. Life has been dealing me a lot lately.

So, to begin, I need to back way back up.

Just before Christmas of 2021, I separated from my husband of almost 17 years.

The reasons why are another post for another day (soon – because I’ve been wanting to tell my story for 4 years now) but suffice it to say that things had gotten really bad. I had already started working some outside the house in 2021 – partly to have “exit money” and partly because we needed additional income because of the financial mess my then-husband had gotten us in to. So since the beginning of 2022, I’ve been working a lot outside the house because I am now the sole source of income for the household – that is now just me and G.

I haven’t had a “full time job” during this time because of the flexibility I need because of G. He had just turned 13 when everything went down. And he’s homeschooled. I was determined that his education was going to remain constant through all of this because all his friends, all his activities, and everything that was familiar to him was in our homeschooling community. I’ve done several things since 2021, but the work schedule I’ve settled into is 3 days a week at an office job, a housecleaning gig on the side, the blog, and gig work like DoorDash and Instacart when I have time.

Unfortunately, because of all that, the blog has suffered. Especially since this past fall when G decided that he wanted to play basketball. Most of my evenings (when I would normally be home to work on the blog) have been spent driving him to practice and going to ball games. G did start driving in October so that has helped with practices but I still go to his games. The season is almost over as I write this. So because of almost-over basketball season and a really stable work schedule for the first time, I really hope to throw some more time and energy into the blog, social media, and couple over tangentially-related projects I’ve been wanting to finish for a while.

Content-wise, the blog and Facebook page are still going to be deals, sprinkled in with other useful information. I’m really going to try to make better content on Instagram – deal content doesn’t translate well on Instagram but if I think outside the box I can come up with video/reel ideas for deals (kind of like this Birthday Freebie reel that I recently made.) But Instagram is still a fun playground, so I’m going to try some more fun things this year and some generally-informative content even if it’s not deal related. And if all else fails, I do have cats and cats are gold content on Instagram.

I’ve you’ve made it this far, hopefully you’re asking, “What can I do to be a part of all these new things?”

I’m glad you asked.

I am always grateful for likes and follows on Facebook and Instagram.

I do still have an email newsletter. It became too cost-prohibitive to have a fancy one with bells and whistles. So I don’t have that service anymore which means I don’t have the feature where all blog posts automatically send in a daily email. I have to manually generate newsletters – so they are only a couple times a week now. But if you aren’t subscribed, you can sign up here.

And above all,