Our Plan to Support You During the Pandemic and Recession – A Message from Home Ever After

Hi friends! This is a letter from me, Danelle Ice, the creator of Home Ever After. I want to talk about how we’re planning to support you during the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (covid-19).

We’re making some big changes and ramping up to give you the things you need most. Read on for the deets!

Where We’ve Been – Learning From Our Experience in the Great Recession

In 2008, I started Home Ever After as a way to help others and share my specialties in organizing, saving money, and all kinds of home systems to make family life run smoothly.

It was the recession. The country was in turmoil. First, things got tight for families financially. Then a little tighter. Then a little tighter still.

Prices went up and incomes went down as people lost their jobs.

Lots of 2-income families became 1-income families.

1-income families became no-income families.

During that time, I committed to helping in the best way I could – to share information about how my family was coping with the recession. I shared my tips and systems and developed new trainings to help moms and dads navigate the recession.

Next, I assembled a group of awesome bloggers who could provide tips and strategies from their own experiences. We turned it into a recession-proofing series that included:

• What were they doing in their houses with their families?
• How were they saving money?
• How did they make extra income?
• How did they grow their own food?
• How did they get creative to get by on less money?

We all learned so much together, and I have never taken the recession-proofing series down from Home Ever After!

I just always figured that even if the information wasn’t needed right now, people might want to read it anyway. It’s always a good idea to learn valuable skills that you might need at some point in the future.

Where We’re Going – Another Recession

Now, in 2020 with the pandemic, we see huge numbers of businesses shutting down. But not just individual businesses like before. Now, because of the pandemic, mandatory closure have shut down entire entire types of buisnesses: gyms, nail salons, clothing stores, themes parks, cruise lines, etc.

New unemployment filings in the US have crossed 10 million people. That’s a lot of people who just lost their jobs, people who need knowledge about what to do next to keep their families housed and fed.

For the last 12 years, I left the recession posts up on HomeEverAfter.com so that people could skill-up on resourcefulness, money-saving ability, and self-sufficiency, even during the good seasons of our economy.

But keep in mind that these posts were written a decade ago! They’re dated, and even though the information is still useful, they could definitely use a facelift.

Entering a New Era and Creating New Things for You

Here’s what we’re going to update for you:

• New photos and diagrams to show examples of how to do things (for you visual learners!).
• New pinnable graphics at the top of each post for our friends who like to pin articles to their pinterest boards. I do the same thing – I pin articles to my pinterest boards that I want to read again, print out, or follow the instructions inside to try it for myself. Having a graphic that works for Pinterest will help all you friends who like to organize their information that way.
• Extremely expanded information. In the early days of blogging (2008-2012), a common format was to post very short posts many times a day. Before social media, we used blogs as a kind of feed that had constantly updating articles. Now, we have social for that!

Because of short updates moving to social media like Facebook pages, the trend for blogs now is called long-form content, which means writing EVERYTHING about a single topic in one really, really long blog post.

This is good for you, because it means you have to go to fewer sites to find all the information you’re looking for! It also means all of our articles basically turns into guides.

• New posts! We’ll be putting out tons of new guides on pantry challenges, recession-proofing, depression living, frugal living, saving money, quarantine living, pandemic home and family strategies, prepping, self-sufficiency, resilience, and much, much more.
• New books! I have several new books in process right now that will help with pendemic, job loss, frugal living, and so much more. They’ll be release as digital ebooks and on Amazon.

Let’s Rise to the Challenges Together

The constant news updates and changes in regulations about the pandemic mean things are changing at a break-neck pace. Your family’s plans one day might need a complete re-evaluation the next day.

It’s really stressful, I understand. My family is going through it too, just like everyone else.

Plus, we’ve had 4 of our 8 family members infected with coronavirus already (3 recovered, yay! I’m still sick, unfortunately).

So the time is never ideal during a crisis to do damage control. But you can do it. I believe in you. All you need is knowledge and somebody whispering in your ear constantly about how capable and amazing you are! That’s where Home Ever After comes in.

Learning to be flexible and resilient during this time can not only lower your stress, but help you feel a sense of control during these unsettling times.

How Can You Stay Updated?

So how can you get updated when we put out new awesome content? Subscribe for free!

We’ll send you emails a couple times a week usually with links to all the new stuff. Subscribers even get notified first and get special sneak peaks into our new classes, programs, books, and more. And right now, when you subscribe for free to Home Ever After’s email updates, we’ll send you my super-helpful free Declutter Checklist as a free gift. It includes 57 items you can purge today with NO thinking or deciding.

Just fill in your name and email below and we’re ready to go! Click here if you don’t see the form.

So What Do You Do Next?

I’m working on a new and improved index to Home Ever After that can help you find the type of content you need by topic. In the meantime, try the beginner’s guide for links to some of our top articles! Incidentally, the Beginner’s Guide is Going to get a complete overhaul too.

Welcome to a totally made-over, updated, and pandemic-responsive Home Ever After! We’re always here to help you in keeping it all together!