As a blogger, I think it’s important that you — my super special and awesome readers — know how (and if) the blog makes money and what I do with that money.
In addition, I think it’s important that I disclose the personal part of personal finance. So many personal finance bloggers talk about their story as if it were replicable without providing the full context of their financal picture. One of my aims with the blog is to show how we do what we do while being as transparent as possible without sacrificing all of our anonymity.
blog finances
The blog is my hobby. I like to write about personal finance, minimalism, zero waste, the state of higher education, and whatever else strikes my fancy. While I do have advertisements enabled on the blog, my only hope is that some day it’ll be income neutral. In other words, that the blog will generate enough income to pay for itself.
Should the blog begin generating more money than is needed to run it, I’ll donate at least fifty percent of the proceeds to organizations that support my values. Those organizations will be announced at a later date, but for reference we have donated money to local pet charities, media literacy, and higher education in the past.
product links and referral codes
From time to time, I share links to products that I use and like. I do not receive commission from these links. In essence, it’s what I would tell someone if they asked about a product that I like and use in person. I might explore affliate programs in the future.
I, also, sometimes provide referral links or codes to products and services that I like and use. For example, I have provided my referal link to Ebates in a post about how I use Ebates. If someone were use to that link to sign up for Ebates, I would monetarily benefit (and so would you) and I disclose that on the post.
our money
Personal finance is just that — personal. I share quite a few details about our life on the blog and that includes sharing about our money as well. Every month I report our spending percentages. I don’t report the actual numbers because it’s simply too personal for us at this time. This might change in the future, but it’s where we’re at right now.
Sometimes I take “deep dives” into our accumulated finance data. For example, I recently wrote about how we went from -$50k to zero net worth. Since this was past data, I was fine using the actual numbers. What I’m saying is that I’m happy to share our past numbers and talk about what worked and, importantly, what didn’t work for us.
As I’ve noted in a few posts and on our about page, Justin is an actuary. In other words, he makes really good money (i.e, six figures). For the past few years, I’ve been a professor. Meaning that I made okay money. Our efforts combined translated to excellent money.
As of June 2019, I left higher education and will be a stay-at-home wife and mom. I plan on keeping active in a variety of ways, but I probably won’t earn money from a job any more. Think of it as one half of the Smiths being early retired.
page last edited October 12, 2019
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