HELLO PARTY PEOPLE!!! LET’S MAKE SOME NOISE IN THIS JOINT!!!

For those of you who may not know us, we are Greg and Holly from Club Thrifty. Although our blog has only been up for 9 months, it seems like ages ago that we decided to bring the awesome sauce to personal finance. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into back then. We thought we would just write some funny stuff, people would come and read it, and we’d spend maybe an hour a day working on our new little project. Boy, were we wrong.

Some Background

The year was 2010, and there we were…wondering how all of our money kept disappearing. We had always thought that we were living a frugal lifestyle. We believed that we were pinching our pennies. Yet, even though we were making a very nice income at our jobs, we had barely any savings to show for it. That is when we discovered the prettiest girl in the financial room – the zero-sum budget.

After cozying up to our new budget, we realized that we were literally eating up all of our money. OK, so maybe not literally. I mean, it’s not like I was dipping Benjamins in ketchup and chowing down on them. However, we were hitting the local eateries several times a week. On top of that, we had a bunch of consumer debt to which we were shelling out monthly payments. We decided – then and there – that we were going to control our spending and get out of debt as soon as possible.

Our new attitude toward our personal finances quickly snowballed into new interests. We began watching less TV. In fact, we cut the cord to cable completely. We limited our restaurant trips to once a month and kept a very close eye on all of our spending. About a year later, we had paid off about $20,000 in consumer debt. From there, we decided to attack our mortgage.

Birth Of The Blog

During this time, we began to read several different financial blogs. We learned a lot from these blogs and found an online community where we felt we belonged. After batting around the idea for a few weeks, we decided to start our own blog – hoping to inspire others while keeping ourselves accountable for our own financial decisions.

Working on the blog has been A LOT more difficult than we expected. We really didn’t know the first thing about blogging when we started, which made things a wee bit difficult. Luckily, we discovered the Yakezie Network. The members here have been so helpful and supportive as we have stumbled our way through building our blog.

Every time we have needed help, Yakezie members have stepped in to lend a hand. Each time we had a question, Yakezie members have been happy to give us an answer. During those times when we were frustrated and ready to quit, Yakezie members were there with words of encouragement and helped to keep us going. We are so glad that we did!

Since we started Club Thrifty nine months ago, we have been very fortunate. Many of you have visited our website, and some of you have become good friends. We are stoked that we have finally found a community that understands our values. Yakezie has been a very important part of our blog’s success thus far, and we hope to be able to add some value to the network in the future. We are very proud to be the newest members of the Yakezie Network, and there is just one thing left for us to say:

WE MADE IT!!! WOOOOHOOOOO!!!