By: Revanche

15 years of money blogging

November 9, 2021

I just did the math and I’ve been blogging in these here parts for 15 years and a few months!

No wonder it felt like time for a name change or something to freshen up the place a little bit.

In 2006, I started this blog because I was desperate to talk about money with someone. No one in my cohort was concerned about money. They all had housing and college paid for or they were confident about taking out massive loans. I was the odd one out: living at home and paying all the bills, and working at an incredibly toxic workplace to do it. It sucked. I’d also been living with chronic pain for over ten years so by this point, my health outlook was bleak. My assumption was I’d be dead or crippled by 2012. Thankfully, I had access to new exciting financial information at Fatwallet and the determination to be strategic about my remaining functional years. When I realized my bosses were rusty nails and gangrene terrible, following the shared wisdom of my elders here in PF blogging, I plotted my career course and took what I could from this job to the next: experience doing everything whether or not it was my job, negotiating my face off to move my base salary up so that I’d have a better stepping stone to the next phase, taking courses in management and reading all the Ask A Manager I could hold. My goal was to grow enough at this job to give myself some real escape velocity, and pay down all my parents’ debt and get them set up for retirement, then get the heck out of Dodge. I was especially concerned about my body’s expiration date.

I needed to settle all these financial affairs ASAP because my rate of deterioration seemed to be increasing with each year. Depression and some sneaking suicidal ideation also plagued me all this time, though I didn’t know it for what it was.

Things did not play out that way, as it happens.

Spoiler alert: I made it past 30, for one. For another, I did escape the toxic job via a layoff right into the teeth of the Great Recession.

About 12 months across 2008-2009 were spent stressing, jobhunting, traveling for some fun and also interviewing for jobs from coast to coast. Mostly I was stressed. Even though I’d done my darnedest to save save save, my savings was not near enough to be comfortable unemployed for a long time. Thank goodness for both unemployment and the care and kindness of friends who helped me out to prevent things from getting utterly dire.

I landed a job in 2010 that helped me start the process of getting back on my feet even as my mom’s health spiraled downward. We lost her suddenly in 2011, and it’s been a long journey of grieving the years she should have had with us, the relationship she should have had with her eventual grandkids, and the harshness of her life before she passed. I am working on letting go of a truckload of guilt over not having done better for her. I am also healing from the process of cutting off my dad in 2017. I have no regrets about that. I was wracked with guilt and disappointment and anger for years but I don’t regret it. Two years after going no contact, he affirmed my decision to stop supporting him by contacting me through a loved one to manipulate me into doing something fraudulent for his financial benefit.

We have made huge progress now that we’ve cut him loose. While his lies and betrayal seared my heart, the fact that we are so financially stable now that I’m actually able to spend money on my health, which I couldn’t do before, makes me happy for us and furious at him all over again. I still bear strong feelings of “I could have started healing years ago if you hadn’t been a selfish con artist.” Maybe not in the exact same way but at least my suffering could have been so much less.

I have been fortunate enough to hold a lot of joy during this time. PiC and I are still full partners in life. We celebrate ten years of happy marriage this year. We’ve got two happy and healthy kids who make us bananas but also make us laugh a lot. I guess we’ll keep them. We deeply miss our Seamus, so integral a part of our family, but we are seeing Sera come out of her shell and that’s a joy to see.

My own physical healing has been long and slow. I went through multitudes of attempts to fix my broken chronic pain and fatigued self, including massage therapy, with mediocre results until I started working with a brain therapist in 2020. That’s helped me so much with the physical pain, born of emotional pain, and I’m so glad we were in a financial position to afford this therapy.

I don’t share numbers here anymore because it’s not just my financial picture. I worked my way up from a zero on the balance sheet, with family debts constantly pulling me backward, to a very positive net worth. Having a partner who also worked steadily this entire time, listened to me about money, and met me in the middle on spending habits was a HUGE key to our improved picture. Having a partner who trusted all our finances to me over time was another big key. I worked very hard to learn and manage our money proactively to grow wealth and support our community. Sometimes I reflect on the money blogging aspect of things and how I came up with much bigger blogging names like Flexo of Consumerism Commentary (who sold for big money), Jim formerly of Blueprint for Financial Prosperity (who also sold for big money and now runs Wallet Hacks), or Michelle from Sense of Cents (who figured out the SEO game and is now making money hand over fist from her blog). I occasionally feel like a failed money blogger since I haven’t done anything financially beneficial with this blog. It doesn’t even break even! This is clearly a hobby. Then again, the other side of the coin is how many bloggers have sold their blogs or shuttered them and disappeared off into the real world never to be heard from again? There are so many I used to read who are gone now and I still occasionally wonder if they’re ok. So I’m doubly glad for my long term readers and fellow bloggers (Stacking Pennies, Nicole and Maggie, Paranoid Asteroid), please keep writing!

Once in a while, I discover my writing has value to other people and that’s pretty amazing. Most times, the intangible benefits are more than enough: friends, community, a place to be free and open with my thoughts on money and life. My readers who come by regularly and my commenters: you’re the best!

We started out as people who thought we’d always want to work and have become people who really liking the idea of reclaiming time for ourselves and our families. We have more to talk about for that future, and a lot more to save to reach it, but I’m grateful that after 15+ years together, we are still growing together.

I’m still happy to be here and that’s a pretty big deal for me.

Sharing is caring!

Email

Twitter

Pinterest

0