Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

I Feel So Small

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Occasionally, I feel so very small.  I’ll try and explain. (Also, excuse me a bit, as this is only vaguely about money and finance, but please read to the end.)

I recently attended the Financial Bloggers Conference.  It’s a conference of people, like me, who run and write (or just write) blogs that are finance related.  Mostly, we write about personal finance.  Whether it’s by design or not, each of the FINCONs I’ve been to have had a very distinct “feel” to them.  The first had an emphasis (at least in my perception) of building the blog, and ways in which we can monetize our blogs to make them self-sustainable.  This year, the theme, as I perceived it, was all about voice.

Perhaps that can be attributed to Adam Baker (of Man Vs. Debt) and his opening keynote.  Throughout the speech, he spoke about defining the why.  Writing for the why.  Living out the why.  What is the why?  It’s the purpose.  It isn’t the product, and it certainly isn’t the site.  It’s the reason that we write what we write.  It’s the reason that we come back night after night to write articles for our sites.

For me, the “why” of Beating Broke is to share the knowledge I have.  It’s to share the knowledge I learn.  It’s to have an outlet that allows me to reach a few people and, hopefully, help them make their financial lives better.  I write articles about finance to make your financial life better.

During Adam’s keynote, I realized that I was surrounded by 450 or so other writers.  Each with their own unique voice, talents, and experiences.  The realization of that, and the realization of how many people there are out there that don’t even use the internet makes me feel so small.  I’m such a tiny, tiny, drop in a sea of information.

Later, I sat in on a panel of some of the pioneers in the financial blogging community.  During that panel, they spoke about how the community has grown, and how much the community’s influence has grown.  Another keynote speaker, Liz Weston, spoke about how our influence is growing.  She touched on how what we do, sharing information online, has become more and more accepted and acknowledged as a source of information.  Again, surrounded by the community of bloggers that I am a part of, I felt so small.

If you’re reading this, it’s because you have become a part of the Beating Broke community.  It’s a small community in the middle of a much larger community.  But, it’s a community with one overarching “why”.  We exist to make financial lives better.  We do it by making our financial lives better and then sharing that with others.

So, today, I’m going to ask you to share.  Share the community with someone else today.  Invite someone else into the community.  You’ve got plenty of options on how you do that.  With all the social media available, it’s becoming pretty easy.  Send an email, write a tweet, share on Facebook, or any number of other ways to share.  But, share.  We become better by helping others become better.

Share your favorite blog, blog post, or any bit of information today.  Invite them into the community.

And, finally, if you’re a part of the community, I want to help make your financial life better.  If you’ve got questions, please feel free to ask them.  Leave a comment below.  Or use the contact form to send me a note.  I’ll do whatever I can to get you an answer.

img credit:C! on Flickr

I Quit My Job: Where I Went Wrong

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I tried, through my previous posts, to adequately cover the reasoning, and process, of quitting my job.  One thing that I didn’t cover, however, was the mistakes I made along the way.  I think that, partially, I couldn’t because I hadn’t had enough time to ruminate on them.  I also think that I couldn’t because I didn’t want to expose my weaknesses.  Now, I’ve had time to think about it, and I think I can easily identify the things that I would do differently should I have the opportunity to try again.  Maybe they aren’t all mistakes (I don’t count some of them that way).

Quitting Your Job The Right Way

One of the biggest changes I would likely have made would have been to quit the right way.  The decision I made, while necessary, was made quickly (over two days), and without much fore-planning.  Part of the motivation was that I had wanted out of the job for quite some time.  How much I wanted out wasn’t really clear until after I was out.  In hindsight, I should have started making moves well before I did.  Unfortunately, I was mired in the comfort of a position that I had held for over seven years.  Lesson learned: comfort is nice, but freedom is nicer.

Have a Full Plan B

Because of the hastiness of my departure from my position, I didn’t have a full plan B.  I had no idea where the money was coming from to even partially replace my income.  What income I had wasn’t dependable.  In a way, I was smart enough to at least get a part-time job.  But, without a full plan B, I think it was likely doomed to fail.

Wrong Way

Get After IT

This is probably the biggest mistake I made through the whole ordeal.  I quit my job, without a plan B, and then didn’t get after it nearly as much as I could have.  I wanted to focus entirely on my blogs and websites and grow them to at least a part-time income.  I severely underestimated the time it would take to do so, and should have spread my roots a bit and taken on other small projects to fill in dead time, and especially, fill in dead income spots.  Towards the end of this round of self-employment, I started to realize that I needed to pick up my game, but by then it was too little, too late.

Have an Exit Plan

Nobody likes to think that they are going to fail.  Just like nobody likes to think that they are going to get into a car accident or die, but we still buy car insurance and life insurance anyways.  While you can’t just go out and buy entrepreneurial failure insurance, you can have an exit plan so that you not only know when it’s time to move on to the next thing, but you also have a plan on how to get there.  I had none of that.  As a consequence, I probably waited several weeks too long to even begin looking for a new full-time job, and risked not getting something in time to fill in the income I needed when our savings was depleted.  I got lucky.  My first paycheck at my new position came only a few days after the last transfer from the savings account happened.  Even so, we’re still struggling to keep up without that cushion that we had grown accustomed to.

I Would Do It All Over Again

Despite all those mistakes I made, I would still do it all over again.  I know the mistakes I made, and am better able to prepare myself to not make them again.  I’m not afraid of failing.  At least not to such a degree that it prevents me from trying.  It’s a little bit like riding a bike.  You’re going to fall off.  It’s going to hurt.  But, you’re going to get back on the bike because you like riding your bike.  I like riding the entrepreneurial bike!

img credit : Crystl, on Flickr

I Quit My Job: Back to Work

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This is a bit of a hard post to write. If you’ve been following the I Quit My Job series, you’ll know that I quit my full-time job back in November 2011 and have been working a part-time job and running my websites ever since.  With any journey that entails so much change, things are always changing.  Several weeks ago, I made the decision that it was about time to start looking for a new full time job.

Resume t-shirt © by WikiThreads

Why, you ask?  Do you want the simple answer, or the complicated one?  The simplest answer is that I’m running out of money, and need to earn more.  Obviously, there’s more to it than that, but that reason is the largest of the bunch.  In truth, it’s less of a reason as it is a symptom for a few other reasons.  One of the biggest of those reasons is a lack of preparedness.  When I quit my job, it wasn’t after months of planning and saving.  It was a decision that I came to after a week and was based far more on an unhappiness with the position I was in.  I don’t regret having made that decision, and I truly feel like I’m in a better situation now than I was there.  The fit of the position and I had fallen out of sync, and it was time for me to go.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t the soundest decision financially.

When I quit, I decided to give the new situation of blogging and a part-time job 6 months to see where it went.  While the part-time job remained fairly stable, the blogging income has been anything but.  My income on that front has fluctuated by several hundred dollars from month to month, and hasn’t grown at the rate that I had hoped it would.  Because of that, and the fact that I was operating on limited funds to cover any differences between my income and what we needed to pay bills, I’ve got to make the right move here and get a job.

In a way, I feel like I’ve failed.  But, sometimes, you have to fail in order to move ahead.  I’ve failed in that I wasn’t able to grow the income from this and other sites at a rate that would allow me to continue doing what I’ve been doing for the last 7 months.  I’ve failed in that I wasn’t able to see that lack of growth in time to find better (other) ways to increase my income.

I’ll be in a better place.  The new job is at a company that I feel is much more in-line with what I want in an employer.  They’ve got a very progressive business model that I feel is very unique in North Dakota, and was key in my making the decision to accept their offer.  While looks can be deceiving sometimes, I don’t think that they’re that far off.  Many of the issues that I had with my previous employer don’t exist at my new employer from what I can tell.  Time will tell, but I truly believe that I’ll like and enjoy my new job.

I’ve struggled a bit over the last few weeks, after I accepted the position, as to what it meant for the direction of this site as well as my other sites.  What I’ve decided is that Beating Broke isn’t going anywhere.  I really, really enjoy the interactions with you, and the writing that I do here.  I may have to scale a few of my other sites back a lot, and will likely get rid of a few of them as well.  I may even scale back how often I write here, but at the moment, I plan on continuing the 3 a week schedule that I’ve been keeping.

That decision is two-fold.  I enjoy Beating Broke as a creative outlet.  I also am not giving up on my dream to do this on a more full-time basis.  I want to continue to grow the site as best I can so that I might, someday, be able to come back to what I’ve been doing the last 7 months.  But, hopefully, next time, I’ll do it right and do a lot more planning and saving in order to do that.

What would you have done in my position?  What other thoughts do you have? How about questions?