Lessons Learned From A Decade Of Blog Writing

Somehow it’s been 10 years since I first typed words for this blog. That means that writing this blog has officially become my longest running hobby ever 🙂 . It’s the longest I’ve done anything actually – longer than my working career (9 years), longer than college (4 years) and way longer than my previous NaNoWriMo winning streak (2 years) before I boycotted them.

This hobby of mine has been immensely rewarding in ways I never would have dreamed. It accidentally helped build a community of amazing people that I met through this very blog, which has turned into meeting people in real life around the world while in retirement. I’ve felt more connected to the world because of this blog.

I also accidentally added some more purpose to my life in early retirement by hearing countless times that my influence has helped someone improve their financial life, which is the highest compliment I can think of.

But enough gushing 🙂 . On this writing anniversary I thought it would be fun to reflect on the last year and what I’ve learned. If you’re curious, here are the previous posts I’ve written on this topic:

• Lessons Learned After 9 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned After 8 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned After 7 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned After 6 Years Of Blog Writing
• Lessons Learned From 5 Years Of Blog Writing

So let’s get into some challenges I’ve had, my recent wins, and how my writing process is evolving going forward!

Challenges

These are the challenges I’m going to focus on conquering this year.

Reacting To “Hole Poking”

This is a new issue that I’ve been noticing more in the past year. I think I have a good handle on how to deal with trolls after writing on the internet for a decade and that’s not an issue at this point in my writing life. I also obviously don’t mind genuine questions – I’ve written over 550 articles on this blog so there’s a lot of info to sift through and I’m happy to point someone in that direction or just give a TL;DR to save them time.

But this year I discovered a different type of interaction that started to chip away at me a bit. I’m going to call it “trying to poke holes” 🙂 . Maybe it’s because of my mainstream media exposure or my Instagram growth this year, but I’ve had an influx of people trying to poke holes in my story, seemingly with the goal of exposing me as some kind of liar.

I don’t really understand the reasoning behind this kind of interaction since if something seems suspicious to me online, I just move onto something else. I don’t contact the person and try to poke holes in their story hoping to find some supposed slip up or hidden truth. There are billions of people on the internet who can provide motivation, so I don’t spend time on ones that make me raise an eyebrow, but maybe that’s just me.

However, with these interactions, I’ve been trying to focus on the flip side of this, which is that people aren’t blindly believing something they read on the internet, which is a good thing! The internet is full of things to be skeptical about. I guess I just didn’t really think I would be one of them, which might be a silly thought in retrospect.

I try to be totally transparent on this blog and one of the reasons was so that this type of interaction wouldn’t happen, but that hasn’t been the outcome unfortunately. And for some reason, this kind of interaction has started to weigh on me a bit. At times it made me contemplate not sharing as much on the internet anymore, but then I would look at all of the kind words people have sent me about how my transparency has had a positive effect on their lives and I quickly swing back in the other direction.

But I think that’s going to be my challenge in 2025 similar to how learning to not seek any external validation (even a solitary comment on a blog post 🙂 ) was my blog writing challenge for 2024. I’m going to come up with a plan so that this stuff doesn’t bother me just like I did with troll comments early in my blog writing life.

Typos

This is a smaller and more BTS issue, but it’s something I want to remember so like everything I write on this blog – I’m going to write it down for that purpose 🙂 . One of the reasons I had the courage to start this blog in the first place was by seeing that blog posts don’t need to be perfect from reading blogs I admire.

Typos are inevitable and I realized I didn’t have to be perfect to post something on the internet, but I’d still prefer to avoid typos if at all possible 🙂 . I noticed they were increasing on the blog recently because I would awaken each Tuesday morning to find a text from my Mom pointing out a few typos we missed. This would cause me to scramble out of bed to fix them, which is not the leisurely start to a day of retirement that I’m looking for, even if it only happens max 1 day a week 🙂 .

My Mom is my Editor and I’m extremely grateful to her for doing that for me every week and adding commas (since I hate them) and telling me when I’m rambling or repeating myself (so I can cut that part out). But this year somewhere in our process, I noticed an increase in typos that we weren’t catching so we changed our process a little.

Now my Mom only edits posts on larger screens instead of on her phone and I have started doing an additional pass on posts before they go live. Hilariously I do that on my phone because it looks different than when I write all these posts on my computer and I seem to catch things better that way. With both of these changes I think we’ve significantly reduced typos in the last few months, but I do know mistakes are inevitable so if you see something and want to let me know – feel free 🙂 . I appreciate it.

The Wins!

Now let’s shake off that negative stuff and celebrate some wins from the last year!

Tech Issues Crushed!

I hope 🙂 . I made a lot of changes on the backend of the blog in the last year, trying to fix some strange issues that people were having, such as page jumping, site crashing and even heating up the phone (yikes!)

Luckily a lot of people with the page jumping issue told me I had resolved it with one of my changes (if only I knew which one 😉 ), but a few issues persisted. I’d done everything I could think of and even got my WebDev Partner on the case and exhausted all of our ideas.

During all of this, I had been talking to my ad network (Monumetric) because the issue seemed to originate with their ads. They always claimed they couldn’t do anything about it…but I was suspicious about that.

Anyway, long story short, I’m on a new ad network now (Journey By Mediavine) that hasn’t reported any of the above issues so I hope they are all fixed now. If you see those issues after clearing your cache, please let me know with details about your device, browser and OS and I’ll look into it.

Crisis Of Confidence Solved! 

Last year I talked about the small crisis of confidence I had after not hitting my arbitrary goal of getting at least 1 comment on each post and ‘failing’ at that goal two weeks in a row. I get about 100 spam comments a day on here and I realized that bot to human ratio was not helping me focus on all of your awesome reactions to my posts on here, but also on other platforms like Instagram.

So I focused on y’all and also meeting people who have reached out to grab coffee. Both of those things have helped a lot to make me realize that I’m not just writing into a void for robots and I think I can call this issue officially solved! I know y’all are out there (comments or not 🙂 ) and I’m still having a blast writing, so I’m going to keep doing it until it’s not fun anymore.

My Evolving Process

My writing process has changed a lot over the years. Here’s what I learned about it lately.

Always Writing

When I started writing on this blog, I was scared of a blank page. No word seemed ‘good enough’ to start a new post. A blank page is a pretty stereotypical writer fear, but after a few years, I realized something – I don’t ever start with a blank WordPress page anymore.

These days a new post page is never blank when I start writing it. There have only been maybe one or two posts out of the 550+ that I’ve written, that I’ve created from a blank page and completed in one sitting.

Most of my posts evolve over time. I get an idea that I jot down in Google Keep, and then a few weeks later, that idea grows so I jot down another note and then another. By the time I actually sit down to write any post, I have a multitude of notes to start with. I have no blank page worries 🙂 .

I think this ‘baby step’ approach has also been part of the reason that my posts are getting word-ier and word-ier. My average words per post has been increasing a lot in retirement as you can see below.

I think it’s because I work on a post a little at a time as my thoughts on it progress, until it’s basically complete in note form and then I “write” it all out. It’s a much easier and less intimidating process that allows me to follow my inspiration instead of only working on one post at a time.

Monitor Love

My Partner has a gaming PC that he gifted his family to use while we travel the world. When we visit them throughout the year, we get to see it again. I’ve been totally cool with the digital nomad life of doing everything on my laptop screen, but I realized that when I have the option, a monitor does make things a little easier when I’m editing complex posts, dealing with a lot of photo files for my flight reviews, or planning travel with a million tabs open for example.

However, I’m not sure what to do about this since I have yet to find an easy and portable solution for a monitor (we looked into iPads as second screens and mirroring on another laptop, but neither worked as well as we wanted).

I do also remember finding it easier to do my marketing job with a monitor as well – when I actually plugged it in 🙂 . When I started working from home in 2016, I quickly got used to writing and doing everything on a laptop and rarely used the work-provided monitor I had at home. I’m curious if I’ll get to that place with blogging. I haven’t longed for a monitor before now and I’m curious what solution I’ll come up with.

Let It Flow

I’ve gotten a lot better in the last decade about writing when I want to and accepting that sometimes I just don’t feel like it. When the writing inspiration flows, I let it sweep me away and follow it until it runs out. But when I don’t feel like it, I don’t force it.

That means that I don’t have anything resembling certain days or times that I write, but luckily since I’m retired I can just drop everything to write when inspiration hits and I think that’s a large reason why I still love writing on here. It’s never a chore because I only do it when I feel like the words are going to burst out of my fingers.

Conclusion

I honestly didn’t expect to still be writing this blog after a decade. I had no expectations, but looking around, it seemed that after retirement, most people leave their FIRE blogs behind since money is less interesting to talk about when you have enough of it.

But this blog has transformed into something I didn’t really expect – a curation of my retirement, a travel blog and a lovely community of people trying to improve their financial lives. I’m still having a blast and am excited to still be writing on here. I can’t believe it’s been a decade and am excited to see what the next one holds. Thank you for being here 🙂 .