Am I really a Personal Finance Blogger?
Sometimes I wonder if I should remain active in the FinCon community or personal finance Twitter, or refer to myself as being a personal finance blogger. At one time, I was. At one time, I was also a pet blogger, and a mommy blogger, and a micro-blogger. Maybe I am a lifestyle blogger now? Even that title does not feel quite right. I am a blogger, in that I have this blog, and I post on it. And since this makes up most of the non-work writing I am doing right now, blogger is probably a more accurate title than writer. So I am a blogger.
The odd part is, the reason I do not feel like a personal finance blogger actually goes back even to when I was actively writing The Dog Ate My Wallet and being active in the personal finance space. And that is because I do not see many other people like me in this space. What do I mean by that?
I am not a personal finance professional. I am not a CFP, a financial advisor, an investment professional. While I deal with finances every day in my job, they have nothing to do with investments, retirement savings, or anything like that. It is more like balancing a checkbook, a very big checkbook with multiple accounts, but it gives me no expertise in the topics of personal finance.
I am not a professional personal finance blogger/writer, nor do I want to be. I missed the first FinCon, but was at the second and the third. At the time, it seemed like the majority of the attendees had as their goal to quit their day jobs and be professional bloggers. Some had already made that leap and were making good money at it, and that is what everyone else wanted to do. Now, most of the folks I still know and follow are either professional bloggers, podcasters, or freelancer of some sort, focusing on the personal finance space. I am thrilled for all my friends who have reached this goal, but it is not my goal. This is my hobby, not my career.
I have very little interest in the FIRE movement. Since most of my readers are probably my friends, the FIRE movement is the Financial Independence Retire Early movement. And please do not get me wrong, I have nothing against financial independence for anyone. But I remember when I first came across Mr Money Mustache’s blog, and reading enough to realize that sure he was able to “retire” early, but that is because he and his wife both had six-figure jobs for a number of years, and the truth was, neither he nor the wife were really retired, they were just self-employed/freelancers with enough savings that they got to pick and choose their projects.
The intensity of the MMM crowd never really appealed to me, though MMM himself was a very nice person when I met him at FinCon St. Louis. But the whole “deprive myself now to save up the minimum I need to quit working and live at a subsistence level for the rest of my life” (yes, this is an exaggeration, but only a little bit) idea has never appealed to me. I have no desire to live on the minimum amount possible.
But, and this is probably the big thing, I LIKE what I do. I made conscious decisions to be in this line of work. I do NOT want to be an entrepreneur. I do not want to work for myself. I like having an employer. I like having paid sick and vacation days. I have a passion for the field I am working in. The idea of working for another 20-25 years is not something I find distasteful. In fact, I wonder if I will want to retire at 70. Some of this is that my sense of self-worth is probably a little too caught up in my professional career, but there it is.
We are no longer in the major debt cycle. Our only debts are the mortgage, the washer/dryer (at 0% APR, on an automatic payment so low I forget it exists), and now the new car, at 0%. Student loans were paid off five years ago. It has been ten years since we had a car payment. And somewhere in between those two, we stopped carrying balances on credit cards. We were forced into financial responsibility by the last recession, and have carried our lessons forward.
We are not saving for our house, nor are we in a hurry to get rid of our mortgage payment, other than having the house paid off before I retire. Given that we are in the middle of refinancing right now, that means paying the house off five, maybe ten, years early, but just throwing a little extra at the principal now means that likely will not be a problem, and again, not something we are stressing.
It is not my goal to become a millionaire. As I said to a friend on Facebook, we will become millionaires (unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong) as we own a house in the Seattle area. As it is, our house is worth around $700k, so we do not really even need it to appreciate, just to pay it off, and that, combined with retirement savings, will make us millionaires. But again, getting to that million-dollar marker is not my actual goal.
For all of these reasons, I feel like perhaps I do not belong in the personal finance sphere. But for all of those reasons, I also feel like it is important for me to keep writing, to keep being active. On some level, the personal finance sphere is made up of the outliers. And while I do not begrudge anyone their freelance careers, their financial independence, or their net worth goals, I also feel like perhaps those folks are not representative of the plurality of people, and therefore it can be hard for the 9-5ers to relate.
To be honest, not everything about me is relatable to a lot of people, either. I have a graduate degree. I have a six-figure salary. I own a home (and not a “starter home”) in one of the housing markets that is hardest to get into. At the same time, our household income is much closer to representative, as my husband is now working part-time, at a job that barely pays more than minimum wage, and this is the first job he has held in over ten years. While my daughter no longer lives with us, I am still saving a “launch” fund for her. We have weathered significant, unexpected, and costly setbacks. We spent seven years owing more on our home than it was worth, due to the last recession. I did not start thinking about personal finance until my husband lost his job right after I graduated with an MBA (and $40k in additional student loan debt) and could not get a new job for two years. We were dependent on the 99 weeks of unemployment in the last recession. I did not contribute to retirement savings in my first jobs. We just started the ROTH IRA for my husband this year. In terms of retirement savings, we are behind where most things say we should be. And we are only in the place we are because my mother-in-law died while we were still in our early 30s. The small amount of life insurance, and later the sale of her out-of-state condo, are what allowed us to pay off student loans.
We are in the financial place we are thanks to “luck”, hard work, and learning, making better decisions today than we did yesterday. I cannot help anyone on the luck front, and I cannot make anyone work hard, but I can help educate them. I can help them figure out the “smart” decisions with their money. I can understand the fear of not having enough saved for retirement, of choosing between retirement and a child’s education. I can help people understand that just because they did not make the best decisions in the past, they can make better decisions in the future.
And so, here I am. I am not an expert in anything personal finance related. I am simply a person who believes in talking about personal finances, that we should not have to deprive ourselves today to have a good future, who thinks you can get there working for someone else, and who believes that everyone can make better financial decisions today than they did yesterday.
