(Not) Going Dark

Update: With the help of some readers, the problem appears to be solved.  Thanks to all!

Writing this blog has been a great journey for me that I’d like to continue. However, I’m caught in the strange situation of being unable to renew my domain registration. It’s only $10 or so, but after sinking about 15 hours of my time over the past month into trying to get Google to take my money, I’ve made no progress. I’ll describe the gory technical details at the end of this post.

It’s not that my blog will disappear entirely, but I would have to go back to the old Blogspot address or try to register some new domain name. Either way I’d be facing losing my current PageRank which would lead to big loss in readership. I’m not sure yet if I’ll want to continue writing with this kind of setback.

Other bloggers have tried hard to get me to leave Google’s Blogger and use WordPress. I have little doubt that WordPress is usually easy to use and has powerful features. However, when I ask bloggers to tell me about any IT problems they’ve had recently and what they had to do to fix these problems, I get answers that make it obvious to me that I would never do what is necessary to keep a WordPress blog going. It’s not that I don’t have the technical background to fix IT problems. The trouble is that while many of my technical friends get a lot of satisfaction from tracking down and solving computer problems, I detest doing this kind of work. I like math and finance, but fixing computer problems ranks somewhere below cleaning toilets for me.

I still have lots of things I’d like to write about. Of particular interest to me is recent work I’ve been doing on the best ways to turn a retirement lump sum into a lifetime of monthly spending. I want to be able to figure out when I think I’ve achieved financial independence.

The threatened cut-off date from Google is Friday, December 13th (fitting, eh?). I will continue trying to resolve this, but if my blog goes dark on the 13th or sometime shortly thereafter, you’ll know why.

The Gory Details

This story began Nov. 13th with an email from Google complaining that the payment for automatically renewing my domain registration for michaeljamesonmoney.com failed. One of the suggested causes was an expired credit card. This made sense because I did get an updated credit card recently. So, I went to https://www.google.com/settings/account, clicked on Dashboard, signed in, found Wallet/Checkout, and updated my credit card details. Problem solved, I thought.

On Dec. 5th I received another email from Google saying that the registration payment failed. I checked my credit card details (they were correct). I then checked with my credit card company to see if they had rejected any charges (they hadn’t). Just in case this is the problem, I’ve entered a different credit card.

I’ve also hunted around in Google’s help areas and in various chat rooms for possible solutions. Many people have had similar problems and have solved them. But the dozen or so remedies I’ve found haven’t worked for me. The main stumbling block is that most solutions involve logging into https://admin.google.com/michaeljamesonmoney.com/, but I always get the following error message:

You are trying to access Google Admin of michaeljamesonmoney.com but you do not have a valid logged in account for it.

I have 3 different Google identities, but I get this error message for all three. I’ve tried on two different computers without success. So, there you have it. If you’ve read this far and have an idea of how I can fix this or how I can talk to an actual human at Google, I’m interested.