Financial Independence Daily FI discussion thread - January 05, 2020 |
- Daily FI discussion thread - January 05, 2020
- Side incomes from Blogging for FIRE, my 2019 revenue report
- Modest landmark on journey to FI - 3/4 million-net-worth-aire! 40M, high school teacher
- [2019] Year in review, pt. 2 of what I hope to make an annual contribution
| Daily FI discussion thread - January 05, 2020 Posted: 05 Jan 2020 12:07 AM PST Please use this thread to have discussions which you don't feel warrant a new post to the sub. While the Rules for posting questions on the basics of personal finance/investing topics are relaxed a little bit here, the rules against memes/spam/self-promotion/excessive rudeness/politics still apply! Have a look at the FAQ for this subreddit before posting to see if your question is frequently asked. Since this post does tend to get busy, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Side incomes from Blogging for FIRE, my 2019 revenue report Posted: 05 Jan 2020 12:02 PM PST So I've been in this sub for quite some time and like many people, were first drawn to the premise of FIRE from a blogger. I think everyone on this sub gunning for FIRE are smarter than average and realize that these bloggers have supplemented their incomes with blogging. How much is the question? I've also seen many people that were genuinely curious at the detailed breakdown of blogging. Whether this is because it's been your childhood dream to blog about something you're passionate about, or you think it is your way to salvation to your FIRE dreams (it's probably not), i think there are many people that want to know how much bloggers make and hopefully this post helps. Most of these bloggers hit their FI numbers long before they really started making money from their blogs but nonetheless, they are earning passive incomes from writing online. How much this amount is rarely shared and i think people speculate wildly and of course some bloggers are much more successful than others. I've also seen many people on this sub keen on how people started up blogs and how they've managed to monetize their blogs. As someone that is almost FIREd, here is a rundown on my website and how much I made in 2019. This post will be a summary but if you want the detailed breakdown with charts and stuff, you can visit my page (link at bottom of post) It's not easy to make money from blogging so please don't think because I created something that generates money, it is an easy move for you. I wanted to shed some light on the subject and I know plenty of people here are keen to create a blog of some sort before or after FIRE so hopefully this will help or inspire! Blogging is not factored into my FIRE # Full disclosure, I am almost at FIRE (probably in the next year or two) but it is completely separate from my blogging activities. I work a full time job (Earning 200k+) and the blog was merely a hobby started many years ago and only recently started to generate noticeable amounts of money. I don't count the blogging income into my SWR as it is still a relatively new profession and past success does not guarantee future returns. When I FIRE, my SWR will be purely from my investments. Nevertheless, it is something i truly enjoy doing and whether I FIRE with $1m, or $10m, I would continue to blog regardless. The extra cash is just a nice perk on the side. I'll use the extra cash for fun spending money, reinvesting in the markets or taking punts on single name stocks. Who knows? What is my blog about? My blog is not really related to the topic of FIRE but rather a travel blog. I guess these things kind of go hand in hand like Gocurrycracker. I started it when i was living abroad many years ago to document my experiences and just kept writing stuff over the years about places I've traveled to. I've also written a bunch of posts about how I take advantage of US credit cards and fully engage in hustling the crap out of them for travel benefits. I've not written much in the sense of FIRE besides making a spreadsheet tracking Net Worth (which you can find if you google "Net Worth Spreadsheet", it should be one of the top 5 results). So in summary, it is a blog about 5 years old that is about travel. Blogging takes a lot of work if you actually want to monetize it. I feel lilke people here think "oh they're a blogger so they must make lots of money". It couldn't be further from the truth. Sure there are plenty of bloggers that do make money but the vast majority never do. It takes a long time to write quality content, consistently while at the same time optimizing your SEO. Nowadays, it's very easy to make a blog look nice because of all the premium themes out there but it can't make up for quality content which takes a long time to write. I've written about 250 posts and each post is somewhere between 2000-3000 words. This means I've written almost a million words and who knows how many pictures. I never had the intention of making money in the beginning because I enver thought it would become anything. However, the money generated is just a nice affirmation that you have created a product on all your own that is "worth" something. It's a nice feeling to get compensated for something you enjoy. How much traffic do i get? Traffic is of course wildly important for generating income on a blog. It's pretty linearly correlated; the more traffic you get, the more money you can earn. In 2019, my traffic increased significantly as the year went on so saying what the average over the year is not so accurate. So i'll use the last quarter's traffic as this is a better indicator for future traffic. This is not to say my traffic won't decrease because of certain factors, but it would also increase too. For q4 of 2019, I had roughly 1,500 unique visitors a day and roughly 2,200 page views per day. This translates to 50,000 unique visitors a month and 70,000 pageviews a month. With this amount of traffic, you can start earning some cash. As of the beginning of 2020, I have been getting almost 2000 unique views so hopefully it keeps growing. How do I earn money from blogging? Before I write a single word, let's preface it by saying EVERYONE has different ways of making money. How I mak emoney is not how another blogger would. There are probably much better ways to monetize that I've not been exposed to but this is merely how I made the amount of money i did for 2019.
How much did I earn in 2019? So now that you know how I made money on blogging, this is how much I made: Advertisements: $5,500 Sponsorships: $3,500 Affiliate Programs: $3,000 Expenses: ($100) - This is primarily costs from hosting and a few premium Wordpress plugins. Total 2019 Profit: $12,000 If you want a detailed breakdown of that number with charts, you'll have to go to the post on my blog. Projections for 2020 2020 is looking good. Ever since I moved to Europe for work, there's been lots to write about and i've seen a pretty solid growth of traffic in 2019 that was probably more SEO related than content, but nonetheless I hope that trend carries forward into 2020. If i extrapolate my q4 2019 to 2020, I should hopefully make around $16,000-$18,000 or more in 2020. Let's see what time brings! How much do the big guys make? So there you have it. How much I made in 2019 from a blog that you'll never have read before. So someone writing about financial products like FIRE bloggers with the type of traffic that gets sent their way by the press, reddit etc, it is easy to estimate they could make well into the 6 figures for blogging. Of course, not everyone is MMM. He was first to market and really capitalized well on the movement in the beginning. He is an outlier along with many of the other FIRE bloggers. While I will never make 6 figures blogging, I am totally content with growing my little mini presence online and making a few bucks doing it. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Modest landmark on journey to FI - 3/4 million-net-worth-aire! 40M, high school teacher Posted: 04 Jan 2020 06:50 PM PST I wasn't going to post anything until I hit $1MM net worth, but my mint.com finally showed $750k+ and I couldn't help myself, sorry. I've seen a lot of posts in FI about the engineers and lawyers and doctors making $200k+ and talking about having a $3MM net worth at 30, and most people thinking that sort of accelerated wealth is beyond their reach. I'm a high school math teacher. I've never made $100k in a year. I live in a HCOL area (L.A. area). And I'm certainly nowhere close to true FI yet, but I feel like I'm definitely on the right track, and that you don't need to be making $500k in the midwest to be on your way to FI. I do want to preface this by saying that I did have some good luck on the way here (as do most people):
Other than the above, I haven't had anything else life-altering in regards to money - no crazy inheritances/windfalls/gifts/etc. So anyway, onto salary:
In 2000 I got my first job making 50k as a programmer, which I started in August. In 2002 I quit that job to go look into becoming a teacher (in retrospect, I probably should have waited until I actually GOT the teaching job before I quit, but I was a young, imprudent idiot). In 2008 I bought my first home, a condo, which has increased in value a modest 25%. Nothing huge, but it could have been worse if I'd bought at the peak in 2007. In 2014 I completed my master's and my salary was automatically increased. Along the way I've done some side tutoring and part-time teaching jobs, but nothing too big - maybe an extra $5k/year, max. As for my net worth progress, I haven't had mint.com for TOO long, but I can approximate the numbers for some of the years:
I haven't had the explosive growth in net worth or salary like some of the people here, but hopefully I'll be chugging my way to $1MM in the next few years, barring a market collapse. In summary, here's my net worth breakdown:
Virtually all of my accounts have holdings similar to what is recommended in the 'lazy portfolio' asset allocations. Nothing sexy to write about, really. Every year I just throw $19000 pretax into my 403b, max out my ira, and whatever is left over into my taxable account. Nothing magical. So that's that. I don't really have any words of wisdom other than to be as frugal as possible, but not to the point where you're depriving yourself of occasional pleasures that you should grant yourself just to keep yourself sane. I clip coupons. I buy at discounts whenever possible. I've only owned 2 cars in my life, but I bought both new, but both were under $20k. Anyway, don't be discouraged if you aren't making $100k in a LCOL area. I'm certainly not wealthy or ready to retire, but I just need to keep my head down and keep saving! One note on my retirement plans. I would be eligible to retire with full benefits (though just the minimum pension amount) when I am 53. At that point I'll see how much I have saved up and decide whether I should continue to teach to maximize my pension payouts. Hopefully the california pension system is still solvent by then :/ Any comments/suggestions/etc are appreciated! [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| [2019] Year in review, pt. 2 of what I hope to make an annual contribution Posted: 01 Jan 2020 01:29 PM PST Hello all, this year in review is something I've been wanting to contribute for a couple of years now. As long as it doesn't break any rules and we continue to get something out of it I would like to make it a bit of a tradition. Here is a link to last year's submission: https://old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/abc47q/2018_year_in_review_part_1_of_what_i_hope_to_make/?st=k4vrw1qw&sh=78ccf3f9 Background For the last 4 years, on December 31st I always crunch some numbers to see how our finances look in order to get a complete picture. I add up all of our major assets, subtract all of our debts and come up with our net worth and find the year over year changes. I then separately add up our retirement assets (essentially net worth subtracting home equity), figure out what our average monthly expenses were(we have tracked every single dollar in and out of our checking account using YNAB since February 2015) and perform some rudimentary calculations to project how many years from being Financially Independent we are. Note: I actually began tracking all of this in the middle of 2015. So there is a bonus 6 months at the start that can be more or less disregarded for purposes of looking at annual variations. 2019 Financial Results On the whole our path towards Financial independence had a decent year. Our investments performed much better for us in 2019 and we were able to make all of the tax advantaged contributions that were allowed. The fact we had no student loans to deal with for an entire year allowed us to put some extra towards our mortgage every month while also bolstering our e-fund. The biggest financial wins for us this year were an increase in income, a more comfortable emergency fund and the aforementioned favorable investment returns. The biggest losses was having to take out a no-interest home improvement loan for nearly $23k and a non-negligible increase in our expenses all equating to not moving the FI needle forward ouch!
Final Savings Rate: 62% Years until FI (change from last year): 10 (-0) Raw: https://imgur.com/a/ZTKjBAq Thoughts 2019 was a great year, both financially and more importantly for life related things for us. We were able to transition into new jobs that we enjoy more, save as absolute much as possible and had favorable investment returns. There was a lot of job-related stress this year and that's definitely something we need to work on in 2020. The biggest downers of the year came in the form of a leaky 21 year old roof, not having nearly enough time off work to relax and enjoy life, a mostly flat increase in our health metrics(this spreadsheet looks much nicer than the weight loss one unfortunately) and according to the numbers the needle not budging on years until Financial Independence! With regards to that last point though, I think there's some more work to do mathematically because it assumes that our financial monthly expenses will remain the same as they are currently which I do not expect to be the case at all due to factors such as a mortgage and the requisite $600/month in interest as an expense, ugh. There's definitely some trimming of fat that can be done in the budget. In the meantime I look forward to continuing to read these forums, trying my best to not check balances until a year from now and continuing to chip away at that mortgage. If anybody has any questions or tips let me know. Good feedback is always appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
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