As I become less of YoungMoneyFinance and more of MiddleAgedMoneyFinance, I have learned quite a bit about life, work and family. I’ve had a ton of experiences, some good, some not so good, but have learned through them all. I’ve had the chance to grow professionally, personally and financially and have written a lot about my journey on this blog. One thing that I have definitely learned is that there are no guarantees in life, and that it’s important to celebrate and enjoy the journey, instead of just focusing on the destination.
In the spirit of pausing to celebrate, I am thrilled to do my annual anniversary post, this one being the 10 year anniversary post! I’ll just pause right there and call out that 10 years is pretty nuts. 10 years of doing anything is pretty incredible, much less running a blog. I started this blog in January of 2013 with lots of time on my hands and a few ideas about money. I didn’t know if anyone would follow along or not or even care what I had to say. I just put it out there “Welcome to YoungMoneyFinance” and decided to keep writing.
Since then I’ve: gotten married, held 3 different corporate jobs, travelled to Europe and Asia, bought 4 houses, sold 2, and been a landlord twice. I’ve bought all sorts of stocks, index funds and even crypto. I’ve gotten plenty of credit cards, dealt with insurance, thought about what retirement looks like, and had 2 kids. Plenty of material for the blog!
I’ll try to keep this short and sweet but did want to firstly say THANK YOU to you, the reader. Thank you for clicking those links from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter or wherever else you may have found this site. Thank you for reading, sharing, engaging, and commenting. Thank you for the kind words of encouragement and the feedback on the articles! Before the Oscar music comes on telling me it’s time to cut my speech short, I did want to thank: Mrs. Money, my parents, NanaMoneyFinance, DC, JP, J(C)T, JW, DH, MR, MY, PM, AM, JH, NB, and so many others! (Queue the music).
Why I keep doing it
It is a bit of a question as to why I keep running this blog. I’ve not ‘made it big’ like I had dreams of doing early on, and I’m still just running this as a small side hustle. I’ve got a busy life with kids, a wife, a corporate job, a social life and a few other side hustles too. Simply put, I really enjoy this. Despite what my 3rd grade teacher told me on my writing, “maybe science is more your thing…”, I really enjoy writing, it allows me to express myself. I often comment that this blog might be more for myself than any of my readers! It helps me process and think through things going on in my life!
Selfishly I really enjoy reading and learning about new personal financial topics. I have always been passionate about managing my money and running this blog keeps me sharp. I’m always learning new things and in theory always working to improve our own finances!
Finally, there is a financial benefit here too – as I’ve called out before I do have a small but steady stream of sponsored posts that will appear on the site. I always make sure that they are beneficial and worthwhile and would never post something I wouldn’t feel comfortable blogging about on my own. This small stream allows me to pay the hosting fees (which as someone called out means I’ve ‘made it big in the blogging world’) but also gives me a bit of mad money. It’s fun to have a little extra coming in to help pay for some takeout, those lattes that I love or even an icecream run!
How I keep doing it
Fun fact time! In my 10 years of blogging, I have been quite regular in my posting schedule. In the beginning I blogged twice a week – Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then when life got busy I switched to Wednesdays (at a minimum). Only ONCE did I miss that cadence – May 9th, 2018. I remember that day – I was at a software go-live (back when I implemented software) in Indiana. Somehow I was all thrown off and missed the post! Fun fact 2 – only once have I ‘ran out of topics’. I remember posting on Facebook for recommendations and got a handful! Since then I keep a spreadsheet of articles and do a much better job of staying on top of planning ahead and capturing good ideas when they pop up!
Thankfully this blog hasn’t been that big of a lift – I spend maybe an hour or two each week. As mentioned, I enjoy writing and the admin of the site isn’t too bad. I did give up on social media (actually for the blog and in my personal life #noinstagram – which idk if that’s even a thing because I’m not on instagram to know) and try to focus just on the blog itself. I was at a point where I just wasn’t seeing that great of returns from my time and thankfully website traffic remained steady as is!
Why I still love it
This blog scratches a few itches for me all at once – it’s a bit of an entrepreneurial endeavor, it allows me to write and express myself, it helps me stay up to date with personal financial matters, it allows me to meet new people from interacting with the blog and it’s fun!
To wrap this up, thanks for all the support, I appreciate you the reader! Happy 10 years and here’s to the next 10 years!
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Congrats on this milestone, Ben! And thanks for the shoutout.