20 Years of Blogging

I’m celebrating a blog anniversary today. Twenty years ago, I started blogging. This was my first post. Hahaha.

My blogging journey began long before 20 years ago, and I thought that since this is a significant milestone, I would detail how it all happened.

If you’re not interested in this sort of personal retrospective, please skip to the end as there are a few things I do want to communicate to every reader.

Humble Beginnings

My interest in personal finances started when I was very young (though I didn’t know it). My parents were divorced when I was in third grade, and I was raised by a single mother making minimum wage.

As you might imagine, we didn’t live very high on the hog. In fact, things were tight for almost the entire time that we were alone, until I was in ninth grade. At that point my mom married my step dad and we moved up to lower middle class. LOL.

During the time it was just me and my mom (and even for many years after that), I got a taste for what it was like not having much. This made me want a better life for myself. I didn’t want to worry about having money for things like food, clothing, and shelter. I wanted all those plus a whole lot more — to have a better life based on what money could provide. As such, these feelings became the foundation of my interest in personal finance.

A funny story from this time…

Many years later (when I was an adult), my mother told me that she went to a parent-teacher conference when I was in high school. My algebra teacher said that she had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her that I wanted to be rich. The teacher then told my mom, “I have no doubt that he will achieve that goal.” Hahaha.

I don’t have any recollection of saying that to my teacher, but it certainly sums up what I was thinking and feeling during those years based on where we started and how I grew up — and what became my intentions early in my young adult life.

Earning a Boatload

Given this, as a high schooler, I selected potential careers that would make me rich. I started with wanting to be a veterinarian because I loved animals, a veterinarian was a doctor, and doctors were rich. So I was going to be a veterinarian. Then, I found out that you had to be interested in and study the sciences in order to be a veterinarian. And I wasn’t really interested in science that much.

So I pivoted and decided I was going to be a lawyer, because lawyers were rich. They made a ton of money and it sounded like fun arguing in front of people. In high school I participated in mock trials (won both times as the lead attorney), speech competitions, and debate team in preparation for my life as a lawyer.

I then went to a small undergraduate college with the intention of going on to become a lawyer, which in turn would make me rich. I went as far as taking an LSAT study course so I could do well on the law school entry test.

Well, as many of you have read since then, I took a legal internship when I was a junior in college. It didn’t go so well. I hated it as you can read here. In short, I discovered that being a lawyer just didn’t fit with my personality.

Now I was in a quandary. I had gone to a no-name school banking on getting into a brand name law school that would propel my career forward. I now either needed to find a high-paying job out of undergrad (which was unlikely) or figure out something else.

Through a series of events, some mentor influences, and a couple lucky breaks, I ended up discovering marketing and I loved it! I then decided to get a master’s degree in business (from a Big 10 school). This led to my first job (with a Fortune 50 company) and working for a starting salary that was more than my parents made. I was finally “rich”. Hahahaha.

Of course, now I know that income does not equal wealth, but at that point in time, I thought I was rich. In reality, I was simply off to a good start to becoming wealthy. I still didn’t know anything about personal finances or managing money, even though I thought I did. I had an MBA. I was a smart guy. I had a good career. Obviously I knew how to handle money, right? Well, not really.

The first thing I did was buy a brand new car without negotiating the price. Well, maybe I negotiated $500 off of it, or something like that, but I pretty much paid close to sticker price for a new car because, hey, I could afford it. I was wealthy!

That was really the only bad money mistake I made spending wise. I did use the car for a decade or so, but it wasn’t the wisest of decisions. I basically floundered for a few years, spending most of what I made like everyone else I knew.

Beginning My Financial Education

Fast forward a few years later. I met my wife, we were married, and I was working long hours. I had risen up the corporate ranks and was making significantly more money than I had when I started. We were doing well financially. However, I didn’t have much time because I was spending most of my waking hours at work.

We decided that we wanted to do some volunteer work together so that the limited time we had outside work would be spent together and helping other people. We compiled a list of five different volunteer activities that we could do and sent the list to 10 people that we knew well. We asked them, “Which of these opportunities do you think we should volunteer for? Which do you think would fit us and that we would do well at?”

The responses to which was the best were varied, and there wasn’t a clear winner. We had two or three that we narrowed it down to. The one we seemed least qualified to do was financial counseling through our church. But for some reason, that one stood out to us, and we decided we were going to help people get their finances right.

We selected that option and took courses from a nonprofit on how to counsel people on the basics of personal finance, which was primarily how to create a budget and start saving money versus accumulating debt.

Life as Budget Coaches

And that’s what we did. We completed the courses, and after that, the organization that we were trained by started sending us people who had reached out to them for help.

The process worked as follows:

• People in our city would write to the nonprofit’s home office saying that they needed help.
• The Home Office would send those people our contact information and tell them they needed to contact us for help.
• We would get a copy of that information (including their contact information), but we were not to contact them. They were to contact us to make sure that they were serious about wanting help.

Out of all the people that contacted the home office, maybe 25-33% contacted us. Most didn’t want to meet with anyone in person. They just wanted help quickly and to be done with whatever financial problem they were in. When the home office didn’t give them a quick fix, they gave up.

The next step for those who contacted us was to have a meeting with us, and we would go over their finances. We would send them a budget template in advance to fill out, and then we would meet with them and review the budget.

Of the people that contacted us, roughly 25% were willing to fill out the information and meet with us in person. So as you can see, the numbers dropped dramatically from who contacted the home office to who actually wanted to do even a simple budget and take the time for a two hour meeting. But it gets even worse.

Of the people that had meetings with us, maybe 25% of those would take our recommendations, implement them in some form or fashion, and then have a subsequent meeting with us to follow up and make further improvements. Almost no one had more than two meetings.

As you can see, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the people that contacted the home office followed through to any meaningful level.

Through this process, we learned a lot. Mostly we learned what not to do. We learned how not to spend, how not to make crazy decisions, and how not to justify personal spending that was just off the charts. And we applied those things to our lives.

We also learned how to be really good budgeters. We had used a budget ourselves, but we got even better at it, and became experts. This set the course for many of our early money successes because budgeting allowed us to tell our income where to go, control our spending, and as a result, have a lot of money left over to give and invest.

Making Financial Progress

During this time, I wrote a couple articles for local publications about personal finance, just here and there for fun, simply to spread the message of basic budgeting and how to control your spending. Very, very simple ideas in personal finance. I enjoyed it and while it wasn’t much, it laid the groundwork for what soon became a profitable hobby.

We did budget counseling for a few years, and then a job change took us to an entirely new area of the country. I was asked to write an article for one of the industry’s leading trade magazines about marketing, which was my specialty. So I wrote the article with a peer at my company.

We submitted the article to the publication and two months later I received a check for somewhere around $500 — which was a decent amount of money back then. But why did I get it?

I contacted my editor at the magazine and told her they had sent me some money and I had no idea why. She told me it was for my article. She explained that they paid authors so much per word, and that the $500 was my half of the money. I was stunned that this was something that existed — being paid to write articles!

This finding plunged me into the world of freelance writing. I started studying it by subscribing to Writer’s Digest, the magazine for freelance writers. I read a few books about writing. Eventually, I stumbled upon a book called Writer’s Digest. It was a huge, thick book, probably 1500 pages. It listed all the magazines in America, the articles they accepted from freelancers, what their pay rate was, who to contact about writing articles, and so on and so forth.

Soon thereafter, I started a side business, writing articles about personal finance. In those days, you had to send in hard copy query letters, and I would mail 15 or 20 at a time, telling editors what my proposed idea was, why I was uniquely qualified to write it, and how many words I would write. Out of 20 letters I would send, maybe one would respond. But that one would pay me so I had a business.

I started writing at five cents a word. Then it became 10, and then it became 25 and then it became 50. Eventually I wrote some articles for $1 or more per word, which was very good pay for a side hustle. By the way, I also wrote frequently for two trade publications in my industry…on various marketing topics.

For perspective, I was still working very hard — many hours a week. I had a job that was all consuming at this point so I did most of my writing from the time my wife went to bed around 10 pm to maybe one or two in the morning. I did this many nights a week for several years. It was pretty brutal, but I was determined. This is why I have little sympathy for people who whine about not having time for a side hustle.

We took the money that we made from the side hustle, somewhere around $15,000 a year, and we put it all against our mortgage. We had seen people we had counseled in debt. They couldn’t get out of it, and they were crushed. That’s why we wanted to be completely debt free. Besides, in those days the mortgage rates were somewhere in the 9% range. So paying off a mortgage was a guaranteed return of 9%.

We paid off our mortgage in four or five years through that side hustle and extra funds that we generated from not spending everything we made. We’ve been mortgage free for that entire time, except for one instance when we took a six month bridge loan while our house was selling during a job transaction.

My money knowledge was growing by leaps and bounds during this time. One of the great benefits about writing is that it makes you really learn a subject. In addition, I was reading more about money. A couple years down the road I eventually picked up The Millionaire Next Door. I’ve said many times that I read it, did what it said, and became wealthy.

That’s a bit of a simplification, but it’s not far from the truth. Obviously, many other things happened and I was several years into my personal finance journey when the book came out, but that book made a substantial difference in my life. I read it at the right time, in the right circumstances, and it just rang a bell with me. It really amplified and drove my money decisions for the next couple of decades which were the peak growing years for our finances.

My Blogging Career

Over the next five years I took a new job, worked there five years, then started another new job in the same city in the mid 2000s.

This is exactly the time that blogging became a big thing. As I was looking at ways to get the word out about the product I was now marketing (Moose Tracks ice cream), I discovered blogging as a free resource to tell about a great product.

I started three blogs to see if any of them would catch on and become popular. And then, through those blogs, I could market Moose Tracks ice cream.

One blog was about the ice cream industry and what was going on in it, sort of a trade perspective. The second was written by our moose mascot and was kind of quirky. It gave the moose a personality. The third was on personal finances because it was something I knew, I had a lot of content on, and I could do easily.

I wrote those three blogs for several months. In that time, the personal finance one took off like crazy. It got tons of traffic and had a lot of comments. It was clear that people wanted information about personal finances from a person and not from a talking head or publication. It was very popular (surprisingly so to me).

I quickly ditched the other two blogs and kept writing about money with the “sponsor” of the blog being Moose Tracks ice cream. Other than Google, the blog was the number one driver of traffic to our website — which would introduce people to Moose Tracks ice cream and everything that we offered.

I kept writing about personal finance, and the blog kept growing. It became even more popular and had hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of page views. I had an agreement with my employer that any money it generated would be donated, and that’s what I did with the proceeds. I would take the earnings, around $15,000 to $20,000 a year, and I would donate them to charitable causes.

I did this for many, many years. I blogged about personal finances several times a day (yes, back in the day I posted shorter pieces but several a day). I was no longer doing freelance articles. Those kind of dried up and the pay dropped. Plus they were harder to manage than blogging, and the blog was doing so well.

I also kept growing in my money knowledge as well. I kept reading books and I read many other financial blogs. Best of all I applied what I learned and learned even more in doing that.

I kept developing my financial wherewithal, and over time, that high income that I thought would make me rich did ultimately help make me wealthy. But along the way I learned not only how to earn, but I learned how to save, as I did when I learned budgeting, and then after that, I learned investing through what other people had done and written about, and through books I had read.

I eventually took another job and my old employer let me keep the blog. But people in my new company discovered that I was the author of the blog, which didn’t lend to me continuing to write and be open about my finances given my position in the company. So I just posted on basic financial stuff — saving mostly — how to save on this, how to save on that, really basic stuff for a couple years.

Eventually, I took my final job, and as it became clear that I was not long for the working world, I started another blog where I could again be completely anonymous. And this time, I could take everything I had learned from all the years of writing and really condense my message into just the essence of personal finance. I wanted to really hone in on what were the most important things that made someone wealthy — the things that mattered so much that if you got those right, pretty much everything else took care of itself.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what those would be. I’d written about everything in the world over 15 years or so, and I really wanted to be short and sweet. That’s when I realized that financial success boiled down to earning as much as you can, saving as much as you can, and investing as much as you can. And that’s how ESI Money was born. I have enjoyed focusing on these three for the past 9+ years.

During the ESI years I also bought and then sold Rockstar Finance as well as started (and currently own) the Millionaire Money Mentors (MMM), a mentoring site where millionaires help others who want to become millionaires learn from their experiences.

And that’s my story. That’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years now.

The Future for ESI Money

So, where do we go from here?

Well, as you probably noticed, I’ve started posting once a week, and I think that’s a general cadence that I’m going to keep for a while. Over 20 years, I have posted two to three posts per week almost every week. If you take 2.5 posts per week times 1,500 words a post for 20 years you get almost 4 million words.

According to Google, the average nonfiction book is 62,500 words. That means I have written the equivalent of 63 books over 20 years. And this is a conservative number as my average posts are likely higher as is the average words per post. In addition, these numbers don’t include guest post I’ve written for others, ebooks I’ve authored, comments I’ve left on my sites or others, and so on.

That’s a lot of writing. Now, some say I haven’t written all those words because a lot of them were interviews. Well, let me tell you that editing an interview can take as long as writing an article. The time I have invested in many of the interviews is just as much as writing an article. In fact, I can pound out an article faster than I can edit some of the interviews I’ve received. So yes, I’m counting those in my numbers as well.

But anyway, what I plan on doing for the foreseeable future is to do one post a week. If I have more to say, I will say more. But other than that, most of my time is spent at the MMM forums. I probably write the equivalent of one post every few days there simply commenting on other posts. I certainly read most of my personal finance content from the mentor site, from other mentors who are sharing their immense wisdom with people who have questions about to how to better earn, save, and invest (plus a bunch of other stuff).

So I am still doing as much writing and reading as ever. It’s just in a different format that’s not as public. But I’ll keep with one post a week here for a while, and we’ll see where we go. I’m not going to commit to going for another 20 years, for sure, and maybe not even another few years. But as long as I enjoy it and as long as there are still readers, I will keep posting.

I do want to say that if any of you reading this would like to do a millionaire interview or a retirement interview, I still need more of these. Every story, no matter how boring you might think your journey has been, is worthwhile. It shares something that is unique to you and that helps some other person in their step to creating their own wealth

So please, if you would take the time to do an interview, I would greatly appreciate it. If you want to simply send me an email, the contact information is at the top of this website. I will then send you the instructions as well as the questions for how to answer the interview, and we’ll keep the interviews going. Plus, if you do an interview, you get free membership to MMM once the interview goes live and you agree to be an active mentor.

I have written so many posts in 20 years that I love hearing from other people saying similar things that reinforce the message. Together we’ve hammered the message of earning, saving and investing for 20 years, between what I’ve had to write as well as what others have had to say in their interviews.

I want to keep doing that, because eventually people will get the message. It takes a long time to get someone to actually change. So let’s just keep delivering the message that earning, saving and investing is the way to growing your wealth. Your help in this, by doing an interview, is greatly appreciated.

That’s the post for today. Not a lot of personal finance information, not a lot of learning, but a little bit of history.

I want to end by saying thank you to all the readers and commenters I’ve had through the years (by the way, I don’t have that many commenters these days, because almost all the good commenters have moved to MMM. So that’s why you see few comments on most posts), and all the people that have helped me along the way.

I appreciate you reading. I appreciate your thoughts. I appreciate everything that you’ve done, and I hope that this site has impacted your net worth in a positive way. I hope it continues to impact new people in a way that money becomes something that helps them live the life they’ve always dreamed about and helps them help others who are less fortunate.

With that said, I want to end by wishing you all life’s best blessings.