Wow – I can’t believe that we are at the three-year mark.
As they say, time flies and truly it is all going by too fast.
My kids are growing, and my early retirement is keeping me busier than I ever expected.
And we are now onto Year 3 of this project that I call Accidentally Retired.
It all stemmed from a desire to write a book someday.
About what? I don’t know. But I KNEW I needed to write.
So 3 years ago I started this blog, and well the rest is history.
Will we have a book someday? Maybe…but for now, I am content to write on this site and help people discover and pursue their financial independence!
Year 3 of AR – A Look Back
I knew going into the year that I wanted to focus on growing Twitter and my email newsletter, so most of my writing this year was done on Twitter and then repurposed and/or moved here if it made sense.
I wrote articles when the time allowed, and continued to do a few book reviews.
I also worked hard to publish more spreadsheets that I use or have used (like my Time to FIRE Spreadsheet) and will continue to do so in the future.
And without further adeui let’s get into some of the highlights and stats:
AR – By The Numbers
AR is now up to 164 published posts.
That means that in Year 3, I only wrote 27 posts, down from 42 last year and 95 the year before.
I’m not a fan of this writing trajectory, but that is what happens when you buy an affiliate website to supplement cash flow. Long story short -> I don’t recommend it!
I also failed to complete any FIRE Insights Surveys. They are time-consuming and with limited time focused on AR, I decided to punt on them.
My core focus as you know was on growing both the email newsletter and Twitter -> having much more fun with those and seeing great success as well!
Finally, this year, we also caught 7,666 spam comments in the spam filter and moved up to a total of 762 comments.
Top Articles
- The Mansion Next Door
- Celebrating 3 Years of Early Retirement
- Cash is King – and the Queen, Jack, and definitely the Joker
- 12 Rules to Break on Your Path to Wealth AND Happiness
- Why I Ditched a Traditional Bucket List And Switched To This Instead
Top Resources
- Easy-to-Use Net Worth Spreadsheet (Template for Google Sheets & Excel)
- Profit And Loss Statement Template (FREE For Google Sheets & Excel)
- Pay Off Mortgage vs Invest Calculator
- David Goggins Can’t Hurt Me Review
- Rebalancing your Portfolio with an Asset Allocation Spreadsheet
Total Articles by Category:
- CEO Tips – 21
- Early Retirement – 83
- Enjoying Life – 32
- Financial Independence – 56
- FIRE Insights Survey – 9
- FIRE Resources – 38
- Personal Growth – 49
Traffic/Social/Email
- Total Web Traffic: 71.8K users and 130Kpageviews (up from 51.3K users and 100.2K pageviews)
- Twitter Followers: 14,789 (up from 6,970)
- Email Subscribers: 1,263 (up from 629)
Very happy with the year from a statistical standpoint.
The newsletter and Twitter growth were excellent and they will continue to be focuses for me going forward!
AR work was featured or mentioned on:
- Apex Money
- A Wealth of Common Sense
- Early Retirement Now
- ETF.com
- J. MONEY *
- Personal Finance Blogs
- Physician on FIRE
- Plutus Foundation
AR Revenue and Expense
Revenue
While making money is not the primary goal of AR, I still want to cover the costs of operations and also provide a little extra income for myself.
As such, I added ads this year (though I agree they are terrible). Still working on finding the right balance there.
Revenue was down quite a bit from last year, and it turns out that some of my affiliate links to Empower were broken.
Thankfully Emily S. let me know, and I was able to get them up and running again in December.
In total in Year 3, the site made $1,336.68.
Monthly Revenue: $111.39 per month
Expense
The cost has remained pretty much the same.
There were some Twitter API issues in the spring that forced me to move from Zlappo to Tweethunter to Hypefury for scheduling.
The biggest cost increase happened when I crossed the 1,000 email subscriber threshold at CoverKit and went from a FREE account to the $490/year plan within just a few days!
Besides those two things, everything pretty much all was status quo:
- Hosting (AWS): $5.95 per month
- Google Workspace (email/docs): $5.50 per month
- Cloudflare (DNS, cache): $20 per month
- Hypefury (Twitter scheduling): $19 per month (split between both businesses)
- ConvertKit (email newsletter): $40.83 per month
- Canva Pro (images/graphics): $6.5 per month (split between both businesses)
Monthly Expense: ~$97.78 per month
Thank You
A big thank you to all of my readers, email subscribers, and Twitter followers!
I hope that you all enjoy what I am doing and continue to come back.
I’d love to hear what you love about this site and would like to see either more or less of. Let me know in the comments below!
While AR is a labor of love, I still appreciate any support financial or non-financial that you can give!
Congrats on 3 years of awesome content, AR! I continue to enjoy your newsletters immensely 🙂
Thanks Richard!!!
I somehow missed your name
I just go by AR here!
Love your material. Happy anniversary and I look forward to another 3 years of reading.
Thanks Ryan. Appreciate it!