Can you believe its been a whole year since The Roamer emerged on the blogger scene and started talking about the journey through parenthood, early retirement and travel here at travelingwallet?
No!?
Neither can I.
But it has indeed been a year. I know because I got the renewal charge on my credit card. Realizing its been a whole year calls for some introspection which I want to share with you. I want to talk about a few things.
- My favorite posts
- What I learned
- My birthday wish request
- Blogs I’m hooked on
- What is coming up this year
- My advice to new bloggers
Its a nice round set of topics from a year in this new world. The personal finance world. So let’s get started.
My Favorite Posts
I am not a writer by trade, so sometimes I have a hard time stringing together my thoughts in the way I want. Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting my point across? Or if there are bound to only be misunderstandings. Though I’m sure you can find some issue with the following post they are by far my favorites. Why? The topics covered and the feeling that the post did indeed reflect my opinion, or were in someway informative.
The first: I talk about the hot topic of student Debt forgiveness and why I’m not in the camp that is fighting for it. Read why I’m not for student debt forgiveness. 
In general I was a big fan of my weekend wandering were I talked about broader topics, sometimes not related to finance. But this one was my favorite and I think completely relevant to the FI aficionados. In a nutshell these people don’t wait until FI to live their ideal life, they live it right away. It is inspiring, envy inducing, and motivational all in one. Go on and read about the EASY Life.
Then there is talking about one of the most spendy experiences in most young adults lives. Marriage, its such a personal topic right!… Wrong! … Hahaha well at least our general focus on priorities is. Let’s start by questioning that ever pervasive engagement ring.
There you have it. My favorite posts. Let me know what you think right on the comments of that post or let me know in the comments below.
What I learned this year blogging
- Statistics are addicting. Seriously its very easy as a beginner to get lost in the numbers. But checking them constantly even if it is only on Mondays( but who am I kidding you know its not just Mondays)doesn’t help you increase them. Nope your just wasting time you could be..
- Creating consistent content. It is important. The good thing about stats is that you can recognize patterns. Nothing compares to creating consistent content my stats showed me so. But besides that I know that I am very attached to the blogs I read because they create consistent content. When they don’t I get annoyed. So why would I want to annoy my readers? Answer I don’t.
- List are marginally helpful. During this year I have made it a point to join my fellow PF on some lists. Though they are helpful with traffic generation it is very minimal and again you circle around to what you really need is consistent content.
- Connections can be real. You can make friends online and meet cool like minded people. This has been one of the most amazing things of this year so far. I really have been super glad to be able to get to talk in person with the bloggers I enjoy reading.
Blogging is a skill and I am still learning, I see how much runway I still have to cover by seeing my peers take off on that runway. Yet part of this learning is learning about you! my readers. Which places me nicely on the next topic.
My birthday wish
As I was saying my learning also come from listening and talking to you. My awesome readers. But I want to give you more and for that I need to understand more. So my birthday wish is for you to poke around and leave me a comment.
It doesn’t matter if its your first time here. Actually you can provide me such valuable feedback by letting me know about your first impression. But whether new or regular I want to hear more from you.
To make it easy I created my…
all post/archive list.
Head on over, check it out. Click on anything that catches your eye? Leave a comment or leave me a private note. I read them all.
You can answer the questions at the end of the post or just give me general feedback.
Maybe you’ve never commented before. I’d be honored to be your first.
I really want to hear from you!
Blogs that inspire me
This year has been crazy for our financial lives, if you haven’t yet check out the following blogs. These 3 are the ones that really caused me to reassess my finances and have yielded great information and even greater results. Just look at these changes.
While MMM was the one who started me on the FI journey, the Mad Fientist helped me find the money by optimizing my tax situation and Jim Collins showed me where to put it to make it grow.
Then there are these which just keep making me come back. Fun, random, honest and everything in between.
Also I want to take this moment to give a big HUGE thank you to my biggest fan!
Tonya! Over at Budgets and the Beach.
Thanks I really appreciate all your support. Tonya is a skilled video editor/producer and you can check out all her work, just click the image.
In reality I’ve found so many blog that are interesting but you know what they say, so many blogs, so little time.
Coming up this year
My posting has slowed but I am not ready to bow out yet like some other blogs that fell off the wayside ( still wondering what happened to them). So I am planning to continue posting and I working to get back in the groove of publishing at the very least one post a week.
Other then that like I mentioned above I really enjoy meeting like minded people face to face. As such the following is in my schedule.
FinCon: I bought my tickets at the early bird discount 🙂 now I just need to figure out all the other details. I am really excited to meet more financially savvy people. I am looking to share a room and still need to buy plane tickets. But the goal is to attend.
Do any of you FinCon alumni have any tips for me on how to keep the costs low?
As I write I know I am getting more acquainted with myself and my writing style so I am going to keep writing stuff up. In the next year I hope to find my voice and stride.
Even though I don’t publish very often I do have a good amount of post ideas in queue.
Did you see anything really interesting or that you’d like to read about. Let me know and I’ll work on those next. I also need to work on not getting lost in starting too many but not finishing any. Some post ideas I have found are very time limited and when the moment has passed well… it doesn’t really make sense to publish anymore.
New Blogger? My advice.
Lots of advice out there. So I’m going to keep it simple. The biggest thing is to create 4-8 complete posts before you put your name out there. Then you’ll stay ahead and meet that consistent posting expectation.( remember how I talked about that earlier)
I really appreciate all the readers and all the commenters
Even though I write my own story your feedback is vital as I work to write things that are useful and informative.
So leave a comment even if you’ve never commented before I want to hear from you.
If you like what you read follow me on Twitter were I post and share more frequently. Majority of tweets are sharing great parenting, travel , finance articles I come across as well as you’ll know quickly when I post.
So there you have it my firsts year at Traveling Wallet has come and gone and I’m still roaming around trying to make sense of Parenthood and plan for Early Retirement and Travel.
Congratulations for your anniversary and may your blog grow more each year. It’s one of the blogs I visit regularly, so you are clearly doing something right 😉
Thank you 🙂 I’m glad to hear that. I hope your design business is going well.
And don’t be shy around comments I am very interested to hear how customs are different in your part of the world. 🙂