Posted by Canadian Dream on November 10, 2011
Around this time back in 2006, I had a crazy idea in my head to start a blog to discuss money issues. Since all blogs need a theme I decided to write mine from the angle of wanting to retire by my 45 birthday. At the time, I wasn’t even sure if that would be possible or not, but ‘free at 45′ had a nice ring to it (heck I liked it so much, I titled my first book that).
Now five years later, I barely recognize the blog anymore. I’ve switched blogging platforms, tried out more themes than I would like to admit and now I don’t even write half the content anymore thanks to Robert, Dave and Gwen.
On the financial front I went from a net worth of $76,000 to $459,000, which works out to an annual increase of $76,600 per year. Granted that was partly fueled by a crazy hot housing market in Regina, so even if you strip that out it still works out to an increase of $41,200 per year. Ah, the joys of having a plan and compound interest. Not to mention my plan for early retirement has gone from a dream to a something so certain that only thing up for debate is the final age I’m at when I pull the plug.
Then of course I’ve also learned a lot about happiness from this blog including the following key points:
- Wants are unlimited, instead focus on your needs. Which by the way are a lot more than food, water and shelter, you also need affection, a sense of belonging, the ability to create something and the freedom to choose.
- More spending does not equal more happiness. Actually depending how much you are already spending it will make you less happy.
- Quality over quantity and more experience, but less stuff will take you further to being happy than you realize.
- Forget what your suppose to do in life and do what works for you. Following what every else does will just land you in an over sized house filled with too much stuff , fat, in debt to your eyeballs and noticeably less happy than I am. Skip average and go straight to being different and be proud of it.
Now of course to celebrate any good event, you need a party, but that is fairly hard to do well online. So instead let’s have a good old fashion blog contest with the following prizes:
The grand prize will be a Vox tablet (worth ~$200) or I will donate an equal amount of money to a charity of your choice.
Ten secondary prizes of the following books:
- Wise Investing Made Simple by Larry Swedroe
- Juggling Dynamite by Danielle Park
- The New Investment Frontier III by Howard J. Atkinson
- What Investors Really Want by Meir Statman
- Understanding Wall Street (5th Edition) by Jeffrey B. Little
- Uncontrolled Risk by Mark T Williams
- The Wealth Cure by Hill Harper
- The Wealthy Barber Returns by David Chilton
- Findependence Day by Jonathan Chevreau (signed)
- Free at 45 by Timothy Stobbs (signed)
To enter the contest you have several methods:
- 1 entry for leaving a comment on this post
- 2 entries if you tweet about this post on Twitter and include my user id @canadiandream
- 5 entries if you link to this post from your blog and email me a link to candian.dream.free.at.45[at]gmail.com
Contest closes at Nov 16, 2011 at 7pm CST. Multiple entries from a single method are not allowed. Winners must have their prizes shipped to an address in Canada or the US. Please note secondary prizes won’t ship until the end of Nov.
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Filed Under: Blogs
Posted by Canadian Dream on February 9, 2011
Perhaps it is something in the water lately, but after reading Dave’s post and this one over at Krystal’s blog I have noticed that some people are little out of touch with how the stages of personal finance typically works. Although the stages of personal finance has been theorized by other bloggers I will put my two cents on it and then mention how that relates back to these conflicts.
Stage 1: Clueless
We all have to start somewhere and by far most people start here at clueless. You don’t have a budget, because you don’t know what you spend. Your investments were chosen at random or with off hand comments from other people. You likely either have consumer debt or will have it shortly since most people at this stage overspend. Basically you are a baby in the woods and the credit card wolves are circling for a good meal.
Stage 2: Awakening
One day something snaps inside of you. You are sick of this debt and you start to realize you can’t live like this forever. So you start to do a little reading on the topic of personal finance and perhaps stumble across some debt repayment or frugal blogs. The ideas you realize aren’t that complicated and easy to follow. So you start cutting back on your over spending and really focus on paying down that damn debt. Yet the most amazing thing of all is your start to realize how the less you spend means the more you have to pay back debt.
Stage 3: The Wall
After a few months or years depending on how stubborn you are the ‘new debt paying you’ is starting to get old. You are tired of cutting coupons and taking a lunch all the time. You miss going out for supper and damn it it is taking so long to pay back that debt. What is the point of continuing? Maybe you should give up this whole cheapskate existence. At this point people take one of two paths, they either: a) give up entirely and cycle back down to stage 1 again (and likely repeat the process at some other point) or the break through and move on to stage 4.
Stage 4: Strategic Spending
At this stage you hit the wall in stage 3 and managed not to give up entirely, instead you woke up to the fact you have been a cheapskate when in fact what you want to be is frugal. So you start to spend more on some areas of your life that you really missed. At the same time you realize you don’t miss some of your old spending habits. So you entered the strategic spending stage where you cut back in some areas to save some money, but also are ok with spending more on other areas because they are important to you. This stage is why this blog focuses a lot on being happy, since that is a good guide on where to spend your money and where to cut back.
Stage 5: Earning More Money
This is a particularly weird stage as it can technically occur anywhere after stage 1. The appearance of it depends on numerous external and internal factors such as do you know anyone who owns a business, do you like to take risks and do you have the capacity to earn more in your current job? Regardless of when it occurs you realize that you can work the other side of the money equation and just earn more. Getting a promotion, asking for a raise, starting a small business, taking a second job…you get the idea. I personally list this stage here because the majority of people that I’ve talked to tend do this stage about here.
Stage 6: Earning More Time
This stage is interesting as it represents the final evolution for most people in personal finance. You realize you can ‘buy time’ by having your investments make money instead of you. This often lead people to write blogs about early retirement (yes, I’m guilty). Also if they stay here long enough they might also realize that even if you can earn more money doesn’t mean you have to. You can also choose to work less and have more time starting right now. Or the alternative is to earn more per hour, yet work less. In either case, the focus now shifts to finding and keeping that elusive thing called: balance. That sweet spot where you have enough money for today and your future as well as balancing your time for today and in the future. While it is possible to hit that balance it never lasts since your life continues to change. So balance becomes your white stag which we endless chase yet never hold onto for long.
Conclusion:
So a lot of disagreements on personal finance seem to flow out of people who are in different stages. If you aren’t at stage six the idea of choosing to earn less (either with your job or your investments) can be a little mind boggling. The same thing occurs for those that have lots of friends at stage 1 while you have moved onto stage 2, ironically that very conflict is what often triggers stage 3 where some people really do just out grow apart over money. So regardless of what stage your at try not to attack others, but rather struggle to understand their point of view. It might be alien to you now, but in the future it might make sense.
Which stage are you in? Do you have conflict with others in a different stage? If so, what about?
Posted by Canadian Dream on August 11, 2010
I was reading this post the other day about how blogs really don’t treat themselves as publishers, despite that is exactly what they are. We produce content ourselves or use guest bloggers to generate content and then publish it. A number of bloggers that would like to go “pro” and be able to live off their blog income but a lot of us don’t treat our blogs as a micro-business, despite the fact that is exactly what they are.
As such we tend to not think with in terms of all the hats we have to wear when you run a blog including:
- Editor: Guess what folks, editors at major newspapers don’t spend their time fixing a lot of other peoples crappy writing. They fix the obvious, cut the any word that isn’t required and send it back for a re-write if certain parts don’t make sense or it wasn’t what you were looking for. The writer is SUPPOSE to fix it and then send it back. Unfortunately, I suspect many bloggers are way too nice about rejecting crappy guest posts and end up doing too much re-writing themselves. That isn’t your job as an editor so stop doing it and hit the reply button instead.
- Marketer: You can have the greatest blog in the world and no traffic. You have to get out there and strike up some interest in your blog. Submit to carnivals, comment on other blogs, do guest posts for other blogs and be helpful to others in forums. All of those can help to drive traffic to your blog without paying a cent in ads.
- Sales: Want some income on your blog? Then don’t just stop with Adsense you need to consider affiliate programs, paid link ads and perhaps launching your own product like an ebook/book, software or something else that people will buy. Income from a blog to be useful has to come from many sources.
- IT: I recently had my hosting company’s tech support try to tell me that they weren’t hosting my blog and that some other company was doing it. Needless to say I freaked out and then dug into it. Guess what? They were wrong and I had to figure that out what the hell was up. Like it or not you need to know a few basic items on how websites work and then have a phone number or two of friends you can call in when you get in over your head. You are the Help Desk like it or not.
- Accountant: Do you need a GST/PST/HST vendor account? Can you write off your hosting costs if you don’t keep a separate account for your blog income? When did you get your last Adsense cheque? If you don’t know the answers to those questions, then you need to find out.
- Writer: Then last, but not least, all bloggers are writers. We often start off doing just that role and forget we need to expand out into the other ones. Great blogs at their heart have good writers, but what makes a blog really great is how well you wear those other hats.
Now if you aren’t good at a particular role it’s ok to get help. Pick other people’s brains or even hire out sections of work. I know my weak points are IT and marketer. I’ve have to beg for help once and while from others with IT and I know I don’t do enough marketing work. I’m just starting to get better at the editor role with Robert and Dave doing regular guest posts.
So if you blog, what hats do you need to get better at wearing? If you don’t blog, which of these hats do you wear in your job? Any tips for the novices out there?
