It’s been nearly a year since I last put a post on this blog. How sad, well really you’re probably not missing much. I do have some ideas for topics though, so I’ll probably write a bunch and then not return for another year! ha

A little about what has happened in the last year. We’ve been with SedonaOffice at work for almost a year now. It’s hard to believe; it’s gone very fast. Overall, it has gone very smoothly. We’ve run into a glitch every now and then, but mostly we’ve just needed to change our processes to match. The biggest was something we didn’t realize until a few months ago. I’ll probably make this a topic on it’s own: What we’ve learned about SedonaOffice!

It’s about time to return to Florida again for the conference, so I look forward to returning Joey’s Pizza and Pasta House. This year Robert is going with me, so he can enjoy it, too! I hope they are still in business. I know it’s been a tough year for many.

I’m about to imbark on a couple challenging new projects at work. One is updating the scheduler I wrote and adding some features to it to tie it in directly to the SedonaOffice database. This should be fun and make scheduling with it a lot faster/simpler. It’s a breath of fresh air to be working with a software database that’s written well and I can communicate with easier.

I’ve found a site with some great training videos for a very good price. I’ve watched one video so far about programmer productivity and I think I’ll log my scheduler upgrade project on the blog. I want to use some of the things he mentioned.

An a personal note, we’re still working on the financial stuff. No debt other than the mortgage, but it sure is harder to save money than it was to pay off debt. I wish we could get back the same intensity we had when we were getting out of debt. I’d really like to lead another Financial Peace University Course… I’m working on getting it approved to do it. I’m not sure what the hesitation is about in the church leadership. It’s a little frustrating.

Well, it appears that it is time for bed. It’s cold here in South Texas tonight; I hope I can stay warm!

Last night was our last class in this course. Like our first FPU course, it was a great success. This class is just awesome! If you ever have a chance to take FPU, do it. It’s well worth the money.

Here are some stats from the class.

In 13 weeks, 38 people:
• there was $22,915 saved for emergency funds
• $30,640 saved for total savings overall
• and $69,275 in debt was paid off!!

Our pastor supports this course so much, that he promises that members who complete the course by not missing more than one class during the 13 weeks will get half of the cost of the course back ($45). In our first course, the numbers started to fall after we got past the debt payoff portion. This time, numbers stayed pretty even the whole course. That is awesome because people will not only know how to get out of debt, but how to plan for retirement, how to shop for insurance, plan for college and how to give. Last night a good number of members got half of their money back. It’s a great incentive for completion.

We paid of our last of the non-mortgage debt on May 5th, 2006. If I did my calculations correctly, we paid off approx. $28,000 in 17 months. I’m not sure how we did it, but we did. I know one thing that helped was a month long contract job from MySanAntonio.com. It paid well and paid off the last of the student loans. It feels great to have those gone! Now we’re working on our fully funded emergency fund and that has been harder than I expected. For some reason, it’s more fun to watch our balances go down on debt then it is to save. I hope this changes quickly. We’re still plugging along, but it’s going to slow down a bit due to me not working for Security One every Monday anymore.

“How come you aren’t working at Security One?” You ask? I was hired January of 2004 partly to help us out and to help my father-in-law change from keeping paper documents and records to going digital. As you can imagine with 4000+ accounts, that’s a LOT of scanning! I also did networking and helped set up a new server and domain at the office. That job is now complete, too. Roger is so nice, I know he’d never ask me to stop coming in, but it had gotten where he really didn’t have much work for me to do. The network runs so well now, that I didn’t need to babysit it either anymore. With rising gas prices, it’s really eating into the business profits so I thought I would step down in order to lower his expenses. He told me he didn’t mind either way (coming in or not). I’m sad it’s over, but feel I did the right thing – it’s not right to get paid to not do much!

The kids started 5 day a week preschool on June 5th at the Methodist Day School here in town. They were going all day on Mondays but starting next week will just go mornings on Monday as well. It’s really nice to have the mornings childfree. It’s been great for the kids as well. Sara and Jonathan are blossoming there and Nathaniel is doing great, too. While they are there, I am trying to focus on my web development business. It’s been a struggle trying to figure out which direction to go with the business. I’ve always been a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of person and that has made the business difficult. I’m trying to narrow my skills down and figure out what I am going to focus on and ‘be the best’ at.