The First Year of Blogging: Reflecting on Twelve Months

We recently celebrated our 1 year blogiversary over at the Modern FImily!  Our very first blog post, The Financial Independence Lifestyle, was published on July 9, 2019 and looking back I personally feel it may be one of the most useful blog posts we wrote (balance, values, treat yourself, find joy in the simple things, enjoy the journey, etc).  It’s pretty cool to look back and see all that we’ve accomplished on this little ole blog.

As you know, we are pretty open here so we wanted to share our thoughts after our first year of blogging as well as our highlights, challenges, earnings, and expenses.  Next week we will dig into all the stats.  While these posts have nothing to do with personal finance really, we thought this could be fun to do each year to see how our thoughts have evolved and how the blog performs over time.  If you’re curious to see what blogging really is like, vs what you may dream up in your head based off the few super successful bloggers out there, read on muchachos.

The Purpose of Modern FImily

Ever since day one, the purpose of starting our blog was to share our story to help inspire others on their pursuit of Financial Independence.  We started off with a combined $110,000 in student loan debt, on average made a combined family salary of ~$100,000/year from our salaried jobs, and after 9 years not only were the loans paid off but we became millionaires and reached financial independence.

We did not start Snapchat.  We are not trust fund babies.  We did not receive any inheritances.  We did not win the lottery.  We did not live with our parents after graduating from university.

We just learned early on how important a role your mindset with money plays.  If you’ve noticed, we don’t write a ton about the investment side of things because honestly the investing is the easy part. If you are new and follow our Investing 101 series (which is geared more so towards beginners) and read the respective material we highlight in that series, you should be pretty golden.

The reality is, having the money to invest is the hard part.  People love to dig into the weeds about the “best” equity / fixed income ratio, or the “best” funds to invest in, or the “best” asset allocation. While we are not dismissing these topics and saying they are not important, we are trying to focus on the mindset that we’ve developed over the years to get us where we are today.

Sure there are little nuances and tweaks you can do to fully optimize your portfolio but the big wins and focus should be on increasing your savings rate by understanding what you truly value and cutting out the fluff.

Optimizing you’re portfolio and making it the most tax efficient are great topics to dig into once you have a $100,000+ net worth. When you’re just starting out there’s really no point to focus on this side of the game. The main focus (in our opinion) is to figure out how to increase your savings rate while not diminishing your quality of life.

The purpose of this blog was never to replace our income (more on that below).  If one day this blog somehow makes $1,000/month I’d be pumped as this would lower our withdrawal rate down by about 1%.  Or it would allow for some extra lux vacations.  But more importantly, if one day this blog somehow gets 100 comments a month then I’d be ECSTATIC as we will have grown our community and my heart would truly be happy.

Modern FImily Favorite Moments

Here are some of my personal favorite pieces of content that we’ve written in year 1:

• A Taste of Early Retirement (the one and only post written by Nic – trying to convince her to write more!)
• Why I Decided To Switch To Part Time
• $0 Phone Plan? We’ll Show You How
• The Most Useful Baby Items for New Parents
• Greed: The Black Elephant

Here are the five most popular posts (based on page views):

• Investing 101 Series
• Our Favorite FIRE Resources
• A Look Into Our Monthly Expenses (more detailed posts on this coming out soon)
• Master The Big Stuff Series
• COVID-19: The Wake Up Call We All Need

While our journey to FI is hardly new, no one in the personal finance space knew about us prior to this year.  I’ve read many blogs over the years but never was big into commenting.  I was a lurker.  I decided it was time to “come out” first by creating our Instagram account, @ModernFImily, and then our blog about 6 months later.  I also started to leave comments on many blog posts I’ve read this year.  It’s been amazing to make connections however I’ve definitely slowed down a bit on various social media platforms – thank you Digital Minimalism, How To Break Up With Your Phone, and Bored and Brilliant for making me realize real life interactions are MUCH more important.  After all, our main purpose here is to reclaim back our time.

That’s not to say building relationships with others in the FI space aren’t important. We’ve definitely been busy here when it comes to guest appearances.  Here are the publications we’ve been featured in during our first year (ordered from first to last):

• FIRE Drill Podcast – Ep. 148 “Planning for a Family and FIRE” (We are on right around the 30 minute mark)
• FIRE Drill Podcast – Ep. 161 “Why Cutting Out Lattes Won’t Help you Reach FI | FIRE2Moms1Babe”
• Tread Lightly Retire Early – “How We Reached Financial Independence In Our Early 30s (Guest Post by Modern Fimily)”
• Millionaires Unveiled Podcast – Ep. 97 “Net Worth of $1.1 M: Female on FIRE, paid off $110k of Student Loans”
• Explore FI Canada – Ep. 10 “Court from Calgary, AB | Moving from Florida”
• Keepin’ It Frugal – “Frugal Millionaires on FIRE – Modern FImily”
• TawCan – FIRE Canada Interview #12 – “Being a Valuist”
• Explore FI Canada – Ep. 17 “Online Meetup | Playing With FIRE Review”
• The FI Show – Ep. 65 “Retiring Early In Canada | Court from Modern Fimily”
• Forbes – “This 33-Year Old Could Retire Tomorrow With No Debt – Here’s How She Managed It”
• House Hacking Success: Ep. 29 “How To Get a One Million Net Worth and Reach Financial Independence by Being Mindful of Your Money and House Hacking with Courtney of Modern Fimily”
• Choose FI: Ep. 166 | “Modern FImily With Court”
• Queer Money – Ep. 200 “7 Steps To Achieve A FIRE Lifestyle”
• Prosperity Gap: Ep 29 “Gamifying Life and Saving Money With Children”
• The Maple Money Show: “Living Comfortably on $25,000 a year, with Court from Modern FImily”
• The Earn & Invest Podcast: “Coming out of the Financial Closet with Travis Shakespeare and Modern FImily”
• The Mentor Project: Ep 18. “Court: The Privilege To Thrive & Retire Early in Canada (vs The USA)”
• Explore FI Canada: Episode 32: “All About RESPs (Part 1) | Money in Your Tea and Modern FImily”
• Explore FI Canada: Episode 33: “All About RESPs (Part 2) | Money in Your Tea and Modern FImily”

All of these have been through natural connections we’ve made.  Looking back, that is A LOT of external coverage for the first year.  Thank you Julie over on the FIRE Drill for discovering us first and getting the ball rolling.  For anyone new here, our Guest Appearances page holds all of our guest content.

What Went Well

I truly have enjoyed all of the interactions I’ve made throughout the year.  I love receiving comments and messages as this means that people are actually reading our content and benefiting from it (keep it coming please, the interactions are honestly what keep me going!).  I love receiving invitations to provide a guest blog post on other personal finance websites or to record a podcast.  I’m honestly shocked at all the guest interactions we’ve had – both with the guest appearances we’ve done over the year as well as all the amazing guests that we’ve had on our blog as part of our FIRE Community Guest Interview Series.

I love all the other members of the personal finance space that we’ve learned about over the year.  Without starting our Instagram account and then our blog, I likely would not be as engaged with many of you.  I love the interactions we have on our social media platforms.  But mostly, I love the deeper connections we’ve made with the ~10 of you who text, call, email, video chat, etc.  Having these “true” connections is what it’s all about.

I also kept up with posting on the blog weekly (for the most part) which was a made up goal I had set for myself.  I’ve found I’d fall into a slump for a few weeks at a time where I want nothing to do with the blog but then I’d get a surge of energy and write 3 draft posts within a week.  I’ve gotten to a point where I have draft posts scheduled through the end of the year at this point.  I find having future topics to write about planned out helps with my stress levels when it comes to content creation (not that this should be a stressful endeavor).  I also realized that it’s totally OK to relax this made up rule and post less frequently if I chose to.  The key here is to ensure I eliminate potential burn out.

As mentioned above, we are all about the mindset that is required to reach Financial Independence and thus those are the topics I love writing about the most.  This is why we don’t write too many posts focused on increasing your income, optimizing your tax setup, or things of the like.  While these topics are important, and we will be covering more and more topics over time, what’s more important (in our mind) is having the proper mindset.  If you want to reach FI, you have to believe that you can and then go and actually do it.  We are trying to add something different to the conversation.  We don’t want to write the same article that has already been written 1,000 times.  We are aiming to stick to high quality posts on topics that truly resonate with us.  We are keeping true to our values and writing with integrity.  We are trying to be open and honest with our thoughts and figures so you can get a true picture of who we are.  I’ve turned down quite a few ads as I truly only want to promote products we know, use, and love.

What Didn’t Go Well

I have run into SO many technical hiccups over the past year.  Some were annoying quick fixes and others made me so frustrated.  For example, sometimes I would update a post from the Word Press mobile app, hit update, the post would eventually publish, and low and behold none of the changes stuck.  Or Amazon Associates wouldn’t allow me to copy links properly and the images look all wonky.  Or my font sizes or spacing would magically change midway through a post.  Or our title picture would be all set up and then after publishing the picture is mysteriously gone.  The list goes on and on!  And that doesn’t even touch on the learning curve at the beginning – pugin? theme? domain name? host? elementor? – we were clueless!  (And still are…)  I must give a huge shout out to my friends Sarah and Laura over at Keepin’ It Frugal who are web designers during their day jobs and have helped to smooth out so many of these issues for us – thank you ladies and thank you for designing our website for us! If it weren’t for these two, I likely would have given up on blogging months ago.

I also have noticed I have gotten stuck inside the personal finance rabbit hole a lot more this past year by being very active on social media as well as reading more and more personal finance blogs out there.  Taking a deep look into the reasoning of this, it likely is because I’m scared to actually pull the plug on the corporate gig and actually retire early.  I’m grasping for connections with people who understand FIRE to continually learn from as the transition from FI to RE is VERY scary even though the math says we’re good!  This is not good for my personal relationship with Nic as she sees how much finances are on my mind this year compared to years past.  I am definitely the number cruncher and she balances me with the focus on lifestyle / going with the flow / figuring things out as we go versus needing perfection with everything.  It’s a really good balance and thus I am trying to shift my focus elsewhere when I can.

Unfortunately, social media is king to building up your platform and as any long time reader knows, we are trying to cut out social media! So this is a bit of a backwards strategy but it’s something we think is very important.  I am currently on Instagram and Facebook and limit my social media use to 30 minutes a day total so I am not posting every day or engaging with others as much as I used to.  I’ve learned that Twitter is the space for the personal bloggers out there but I don’t Tweet.  I’ve never felt the urge to learn how to navigate through that platform.  It may take a hit to our growth but the distance from the online world is not up for debate for us.

Must Be The Moneyyyy

Ok, so blogging is a pain in the ass, but at least it is a money making side hustle!  Right?!  Riiiiiight?!?!  Ha!  NO.  In fact we are losing money.  Yes, you read that right.

Why?  Because I am not putting up any ads on the site.  And we have to pay to have Word Press host our site and we also have to pay for the rights for our domain name.  Additionally, I haven’t dug into SEO, writing for views, or any other money making strategies out there.  I likely should pay attention to these, but I haven’t taken the time to yet.  I recently connected with a fellow FI seeker who focuses on SEO for bloggers and we will be swapping services – I will be going over her finances and help with what to do with her money (a very good problem for her to have) and she will help with the next few steps regarding SEO optimization.

Given our relatively low page views, we would be making pennies on ads at this point.  We’ve received similar suggestions from many other successful bloggers out there who have stated to wait to even consider ads until your website is more established.  Like a minimum of 10,000 monthly page views.  So we’re still a ways away from even considering to monetize the blog with ads.  I also want to be very careful here as I do not want the site to look awful with tons of awkward ads popping up all over the place and thus diminishing user experience.  I would start with a very minimum number of ads to ensure the flow of the site isn’t reduced significantly.

At first I thought I’d never put up ads as it goes against my grain with all the advertising and marketing we are already bombarded with.  After thinking about it and speaking to others, I’ve come to realize that blogging is essentially how I am able to get paid to provide you, dear reader, with free content.  Blogging is HARD and I think we all deserve to get paid so I’m not anti-ads, I just want to be selective and slow with this step.  So maybe one day, when we cross over 10,000 page views, you might see ads on the site.  If/when that day comes, please please please do not fall prey to them and just glaze right over them.  I think most people reading blogs geared towards financial independence do this already.

Gone are the days where making money from blogs was “easy money”.  Military Dollar asked on Twitter if any FIRE bloggers out there 1.) monetize, 2.) if the income covers their blog expenses, and 3.) if the income covers their lifestyle costs. It’s actually quite comical to read through all the responses.  If you think blogging is a get rich quick scheme boy oh boy you’re out to lunch.  Sure, there are some successful bloggers out there but realize they are the minority and have likely been blogging for quite a long time.

2019-2020 Expenses:

• Word Press hosting: $139 USD for 3 years so $46 USD / year
• Domain Name: $7 USD / year

Total Expenses: $53 USD or ~$69 CAD

How have we made money on the site?

• We’ve made $0.40 through Amazon Affiliates. Weeooo!  I’m actually really glad this is low as this means most readers are either buying second hand or utilizing your local library and not getting suckered into the consumerism pull of the behemoth that is Amazon.
  • Insider scoop: If you ever plan on buying ANYTHING on Amazon.com you can click on one of our Amazon links, go search for whatever item you were planning to buy, and then purchase it like normal and we would receive a little kickback even if the item you purchased has nothing to do with the specific item we linked to.  All that matters for us to receive the kickback is using our link from the beginning to get to Amazon and then head on over to whatever item you were intending to search like you normally would.  If you think to do this in the future, thank you in advance!
• We’ve knocked Nic’s phone plan down by an additional $9/month thanks to the referrals from readers using our code to sign up for Public Mobile. This is a company we use and trust which is why we wrote a blog post dedicated solely on it.  So far this has saved us about $40 and counting.
• We’ve had a few readers sign up with Questrade through our affiliate link.  This one day should provided us with $140 in income.  However, it’s likely very slim.  The customers who signed up with our affiliate link need to first make 10 commissionable trades for us to receive our payment.  Since Questrade offers free ETF purchases (and that’s what we hope any new customer buys) and we hope you buy and hold for the long term, it likely will take a very long time for these customers to have 10 comissionable trades aka sells.  If you’re interested in making the move to DIY investing with Questrade you’ll receive $50 in commission free trades when you open a self directed account or a first free month of Questwealth Portfolio.  Note again that with Questrade buying ETFs is free but selling costs $4.95-$9.95 so the $50 in commission free trades could be applied down the road when it’s time for you to sell – and again I mean way down the road because around here we are LONG TERM investors right?!

We also recently started offering coaching sessions on a VERY low key basis.  I am currently coaching my first two couples which includes 3 one-hour long video sessions along with homework assignments for $300 USD.  So there’s $600 in coaching revenue so far.  I am keeping that separate though as this is not passive income from the blog.  If you’re interested in a coaching session with us, feel free to contact us and we can see if we’re a good fit.

2019-2020 Earnings:

• Amazon: $0.40
• Public Mobile: $40
• Questrade: $0

Total Income: $40.40 CAD

Net: -$29 CAD

Ballin over here!  Now, let’s calculate what this equates to for my hourly wage.

Over the first year, I’ve written 47 posts and each posts takes on average 6 hours to write.  So 282 hours have been spent on the blog meaning I lost $0.10 for every hour spent writing.  Compare that to my real hourly wage at my corporate job of $54/hour and it’s OBVIOUS where the money lives.  Moral of the story, if you’re looking to get rich from blogging, you’re in it for the wrong reasons! 

There’s a stereotype floating around that it’s easy to make a lot of money from blogging but in reality that’s really not true.  Especially for the first year.  I read a stat that only 8% of the bloggers out there make enough money to support their family and a majority of blogs fizzle out within the first year.  Maybe if you get VERY established after 5+ years and have many people referring others to your site?  I don’t know, I’m clearly not there yet haha.  Nor is that my priority.

What Does the Future Hold

So… did I find my calling in life and find my true passion in blogging?  No.  Haha.  No no no.  I am a terrible writer and it takes me FOREVER to write a post.  It takes me MANY hours to write a post, then proof read it, then edit it again.  And still there are many grammatical errors that I find after it goes live.  And that’s not to mention all the annoying quirks and kinks I continually run into with Word Press mentioned above.

I do want to help others, illustrate our story, and hope that readers feel inspired and take action to make actionable life tweaks to improve their lifestyle.  That’s why I write.  It’s not because I love spending $0.10 per hour to write.  It’s because I want more people to benefit from the mindset shift.

I’m about to share something I likely shouldn’t be sharing.  To be completely honest, I write these posts when I’m at work during a slow period while staring at my computer screens.  So I guess technically I am getting paid to write?!  I have found that I am not motivated AT ALL to turn on our laptop and work on the blog while I’m at home.  Instead, I’d rather be hanging out with the family or reading.  So, as long as I remain working part time and my work allows for some slow periods to write, I’ll be here.  Once I finally decide to pull the plug with the corporate gig, we shall see what the future holds.  Maybe I’ll suddenly want to be more focused on the blog at home to be able to connect with others since I’ll lose that social aspect at work (even though I’m a vampire and only work night shift and thus only ever interact with my one sole shift partner)?  Or maybe I’ll lose touch with the blog and not feel the need to write as much and maybe transition to one post a month instead of one post a week?  I’m interested to see how the future unfolds.

We did commit to three years with Word Press when we first started our blog so we know we’ll be here for at least another 2 years.  My plan until hopeful babes 2 is born is quite simple: try to stick to my rough weekly content schedule and write quality posts.  It would be great to continue to grow our syndication opportunities.  In 2021 I’d like to also add a “best of the month” post highlighting some of my favorite blog posts or podcast episodes I’ve come across from other members of the FI community.  Year 3 and beyond I want to have found a way to run the blog without being over run by the blog.  The intensity with which I approached this first year is not sustainable and I totally recognize that, especially if we add another little human into the world.

Whoa!  That was a long recap!  I hope you enjoyed the synopsis and glimpse into my thoughts after the first year.  Overall, I’m very pleased with how the first year of blogging went for Modern FImily.  I hope I can continue to elevate this blog to the next level.  Anyone out there surprised to hear that we lost money this year?

Any feedback on how we can make our blog more user friendly?  Are there any specific blog topics you’d like us to focus more on?  Please provide us with some constructive feedback so we can make this the best experience for you!

Support This Blog

If you liked this article and want more content like this, please support this blog by sharing it.  Not only does it help spread the FIRE, but it lets me know what content you find beneficial.  Writing is NOT my strong suit and it honestly takes me hours to write each post so the more encouragement the better!  Engaging in the comments below keeps me motivated.  You can also support this blog by subscribing to receive emails anytime a new post is published.  Thank you FImily!

We believe in stacking up life hacks to keep your enjoyment levels to the max without depleting your bank account.  Here are some ways to further educate yourself and save thousands of dollars over your lifetime by making some simple adjustments:

• Investing Newbies: Check out our free Investing 101 Series.
• How much are you paying for your phone plan?  Canadians, learn more about Public Mobile, and see how we are paying $3/mo for our cell phone plan.
• How much are you paying for internet?  Canadians, learn more about the various Independent Service Providers out there to see who services your area so you can lower your monthly bills.
• How much are you paying for home insurance?  We were able to reduce our rates by 25% by switching over to Square One Insurance.  If you live in BC, AB, SK, MB, and ON, check out Square One for your home insurance, landlord insurance, and/or tenant insurance.  Use this link to receive an extra $15 off your quote.  (Note that you must use this link to start the process to get the $15 off even if you prefer to pay over the phone.)
• How much are you paying for your monthly utility bills?  See how you can likely save on this monthly expense.

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