I’m M, and like many people right now, I’ve been living in survival mode. In 2025, my life was turned upside down. As my therapist put it, “you checked almost all the boxes for major life changes!” It’s a long story for another time, but essentially: my family unexpectedly grew, I had to leave my job, and we had to factor those and several other huge life changes into an already super tight budget. To top it all off, the world is on fire and prices just keep going up. It has truly been one thing after another, and I know I’m not the only one feeling this way right now.
Instability feels terrible, and being the “fixer” of my family, I immediately began to fixate on finding ways to manage my home and my family in ways that are financially efficient but also as stress-free as possible. This fixation and my love of writing culminated in this blog, which I started for two main reasons: One, to organize my thoughts and strategies as I try to survive one of the most stressful periods of my life so far. And two, to share those strategies with anyone else who may need them. I hope you find something useful here, and I hope that you’ll feel comfortable to share anything you’ve learned that might benefit others in this space.
A few disclaimers about this blog -
1. Privilege is a real thing. I am currently housed, mostly able-bodied, and I am able to rely on friends and family for help sometimes – I understand that not everyone enjoys those same privileges. Some of the advice I share may not be feasible for everyone. I will try to offer ideas to cover as many different situations as possible, but I can only operate from my own experience. This is one reason that I encourage you to comment if you have something to offer that I have not considered. You’ll hear me talk about this a lot, but in order to survive, we need a community.
2. This is not a parenting blog, but kids will be mentioned often. I am a parent, and keeping kids fed, clothed, enriched, and happy is a full time job and can be quite expensive. A lot of the suggestions I have involving caretaking for children can be translated into other areas – like caretaking for other adults or even for yourself. As much as possible, I will try to make this advice universal or at the very least, I’ll make it clear in the title that a post is about kids/parenting, so you can skip it if you wish.
3. I will never use AI. This blog is all me – em dashes and all (sorry, I’ve always loved them). So my sentences may be clunky and I may ramble, but you’re always getting the real me. As a lifelong writer and the parent of a budding artist, I’m firmly against the use of AI in all art forms. Human artists all the way!
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