Congrats to ladam8518. I’ll be sending you an email with instructions on how to claim your book.

There will be more giveaways to come. Stay tuned…

*Affiliate Link

Oh, there’s been good things that have come from blogging. Things like:

• making friends with people from all over the U.S. and world. Some of my long-time readers I count as friends. I’m even friends with a few of them on facebook.

• the outpouring of love and concern for me and my family when my Dad passed away in March 2008.

• helping people understand personal finance. Unfortunately, I could have done better with this one. I started out pretty good with this one but have strayed a bit from this cause for a couple of reasons. The first being that I felt like exhausted a lot of the basic topics and that there just wasn’t that much more to write about. I have ton of helpful topics and posts but you have to dig to find them.

• learning new things from my readers and commenters. I have been blessed to have really smart readers that have taught me a lot about topics that I wasn’t 100% sure about. It makes blogging interesting and humbling.

• read lots of books. Most of them have been good.

• made a little money. Not enough to justify the time spent blogging though…

There have also been lots of frustrations…

• blog maintenance can be a major issue for someone with limited coding skills.

• getting sued for copyright infringement and having to change my blog’s name and URL.

• watching my blog’s traffic and revenue plummet this past year. It was a fun watching my blog’s traffic and revenue grow. Once they started falling, I began to lose interest in blogging. I began to wonder why in the hell I was doing this.

• watching other blogs continually grow while I seemingly sputter along.

• allowing my emotions to get in the way while discussing politically-charged topics. I did enjoy the discussions though.

Like I said, it’s been fun when it wasn’t not fun.

What does the future hold for me and AFM?

I’m not sure. I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching and contemplating where I want to go next. So far, it’s still foggy.

Anyway, I’m going to celebrate tomorrow by hosting this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance.

Whatever I did, unleashed a nasty, nasty virus that rendered my computer useless. My screen was blue with ominous red writing (full of misspelled words and horrible grammar), telling me that my computer was at risk. They then tried to get me to download some “anitvirus software.”

In an attempt to get rid of the virus…

I ran Spybot Search & Destroy…it didn’t work.

I ran Malwarebytes…it didn’t work.

I ran Windows Defender…it didn’t work.

I did a boot-level scan with Avast…IT DIDN’T WORK!

NOTHING WORKED!

I even had my brother work on it for me. Apparently the virus unleashed different files that disabled various programs (Windows Update and Defender would not update properly). Internet Explorer was hijacked and every place I tried to go was redirected elsewhere.

It was very frustrating.

I finally decided to admit defeat and do a complete format/restore, which took my computer all the way back to the way it was when I bought it over three years ago. I have been reloading software this evening and hope to be back up and running tomorrow morning.

BOTTOM LINE: BE CAREFUL. There’s a lot of crap out there. DON’T CLICK ON ANYTHING—warnings or otherwise. Keep your software up-to-date (easier said than done).

Okay, I’m not sure what Twitter is all about but I figured since nearly every other blogger has a Twitter badge, I had better get one too. So, as you can see on the upper right hand side of this page, there is a brand new fancyTwitter badge (or you can use the one in this post). If you are into Twitter, I’d love it if you followed AFM (Twitter.com/AFMBlog).

Thanks for reading…

The results should be reported later today.

Stay tuned…

I was dropping my youngest son off at daycare when the woman at the front desk told me that a plane had hit one of the towers. I got to work in time to see the second plane slam into the south tower, the plane hit the Pentagon, and Flight 93.

I’ll never forget that day.

My thoughts and prayers are with those families who lost loved ones that day.

Commenter #46, Vishal Parekh

Congrats to Vishal.

I’ll be hosting another giveaway in the next couple of days. This one will be for a college planning book. Stay tuned…

I’ll announce today’s giveaway in a bit. Stay tuned…

I’ll be back Thursday or Friday.

Have a great week!