It has been an amazing year this year, with a lot of twists and turns at our house. We were dealing with a tough pregnancy, and then a tough birth of our new son. And now we're getting to experience life as parents as well! It's been a lot of fun.

Now the new year is coming on, and with it new challenges, but also the hope of rebirth and fresh starts. So let's all take that opportunity to make this next year the best one ever!

God bless and Happy new year!

I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! Thank you for reading my lowly blog this year as we've grown from nothing to the point where we've got thousands of page views every month. I couldn't have done it without you all, and I'm so thankful for every one of you in this Christmas season.

Things may be a bit dead around here for the next few days as we celebrate with family, but I hope that you and yours have a blessed holiday. God bless!

I just launched this blog earlier this week with the goal of keeping myself accountable, sharing useful information as it pertains to personal finance, and of course helping others who are having a hard time with their money.

One of the goals I have for the blog in the first few months is that I really want to build a name for my blog by promoting it through social media, search engines and other venues. I also want to build relationships with other bloggers and network to help build community and help each other out.

A group of other bloggers are looking to network and increase their site's profiles are the folks over at the Financial Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge. The whole idea of the challenge is to get a group of bloggers together to promote each other, visit each other's sites using the Alexa toolbar (to raise each other's rankings), and also to just build some community.

From what I can tell the challenge has been successful thus far in helping the other bloggers to raise their profiles and to drop their Alexa number. My number doesn't exist yet for this site, as I'm still getting indexed by the Google search engines, but I hope that it will help me to drop my number as well once it appears.

Check out the group – and help us all to drop our numbers! Financial Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge

A while back I started blogging online so that I could share my thoughts on politics, money, religion and a variety of other topics. I found that I wasn't really passionate about all the topics, and as such I wasn't really able to keep enough interest in the topics to continue blogging more than a few months.

Since I've started writing about money for other sites, however, I've realized that the topic of personal finance, investing, debt reduction and anything finance related is really extremely interesting to me. Add to that the fact that I believe there are so many people that really need help in this area, and I knew that the personal finance niche would be one I was interested in joining.

Subscribe And Stay In Touch

At the launch of this blog I've set up several ways that people can subscribe, follow and stay in touch with Smart On Money.

1. Subscribe via RSS

Familiar with RSS and News Aggregators? You can follow Smart On Money via our RSS Feed! Simply add it to your news aggregator, and you’ll get notification every time I write up a post here on the blog.

What Is RSS? RSS is a  great tool that allows you to get updates from your favorite blogs and websites without actually visiting them.  (For an overview of RSS check out this video here). Instead of “bookmarking” your favorites via your web browser, you can now use an RSS reader to keep you informed of any updates. Google Reader is my favorite way to subscribe to Smart On Money.

2. Receive Daily Emails

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3. Follow Us On Twitter

Join other tweeters and follow us on Twitter.com! I go by the name of @smartonmoney on twitter, and I send frequent updates including links to great deals, useful articles on other sites, and general personal finance chatter. It’s also a great way to get to know me! http://twitter.com/smartonmoney

Thanks For Checking Us Out!

Thanks so much for stopping by today on our launch, and I look forward to sharing all sorts of great personal finance information with you over the coming months! Please leave a comment and say hi so I know that you've stopped by today!