Happy One Year, FieryMillennials!

One year ago today, I began a bold new adven­ture. An adven­ture along the lines of Sam and Frodo’s jour­ney to destroy the ring, or The Illiad.

Blog­ging.

Yep. I equat­ed blog­ging to Lord of the Rings, and I regret nothing.

Because, it actu­al­ly has been a jour­ney. I look back at every­thing I’ve writ­ten and am filled with a curi­ous mix­ture of embar­rass­ment and pride. The very first arti­cles I wrote were a lit­tle rough, but that’s to be expected.

I’m proud of what I’ve done so far. Nor­mal­ly, I start some­thing and then tend to not do too much with it in the future (aka most of my hob­bies), so I’m espe­cial­ly pleased I’ve made it a whole year!

I thought I’d cel­e­brate my blog-ver­sary (blog­day?) with a list of some of my most pop­u­lar arti­cles and cat­e­gories. Thanks for fol­low­ing along with my jour­ney and may we have many more years to follow!

Top Articles:

It’s no sur­prise (to me) that my top two arti­cles are on my Ecuado­ri­an adven­tures at the Chau­tauqua last fall. My first arti­cle was on the over­all trip, and then I fol­lowed it up with an arti­cle on every­thing I learned and was inspired to start!

Chau­tauqua 2015: where the wild cows roam, tepid hot tubs abound, and friend­ships grow! All under an exot­ic cloud­for­est envi­ron­ment on the Equator.

Lessons from the Chau­tauqua: Where I rumi­nate on all the incred­i­bly impor­tant lessons I learned, from the best under­wear to buy, that I can actu­al­ly eat a whole fried fish, to find­ing the courage to start my adven­ture in real estate!

 

Lots of peo­ple appre­ci­at­ed my thoughts on Google’s Project FI plan. 5 months in and I still rec­om­mend it just as much as the first day I got it, if not more!

 

Then we delve into my Month­ly Spend­ing Reports. The most recent ones seem to be most pop­u­lar (up until about Decem­ber) which I would guess is due to the blog pick­ing up more read­ers. All you voyeurs who would like to see all the details of my spend­ing for the past year can view them here: Month­ly Spend­ing Reports.

 

The next pop­u­lar group is on my house saga. For those of you who don’t know, I’m cur­rent­ly in the midst of buy­ing a mul­ti-fam­i­ly prop­er­ty. I plan on liv­ing in one side and rent­ing out the oth­er for a year or so, and then mov­ing out to increase my pas­sive income stream. How­ev­er, I can’t do that until I close on the house, which was sup­posed to be April 1^st and is now a big fat ques­tion mark due to a zon­ing issue. The staffers in the town zon­ing office will NOT be get­ting a Christ­mas card from me this year.

If you’d like to get a more indepth descrip­tion of the house tri­al and tribu­la­tion, check them out here: Real Estate

 

After those two clear-cut cat­e­gories, the page views get more jum­bled, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite arti­cles (maybe even give a brief update!).

I did a few arti­cles on the basics of bud­get­ing, which I still do to this day. I know there are some peo­ple out there who don’t bud­get and that’s a‑ok. How­ev­er, if you’d like to know how I set up my bud­gets, check them out with Part 1 and Part 2!

 

I have a love­ly cat­e­go­ry of all the Rants and Raves I have. I’m prettt­ty pas­sion­ate about every­thing relat­ed to per­son­al finances, bud­get­ing and Finan­cial Inde­pen­dence (I don’t know if you’ve noticed that at all), so when some­thing comes up I tend to have a pret­ty strong reac­tion to it. Either I go on this huge long rant, or I tend to go on and on and rave about some­thing great. In fact, I might have a rant com­ing up where I talk about my neigh­bors. And peski­ly per­sis­tent finan­cial advisors.

To see all of my past Rant and Raves, check them out here!

 

I real­ly enjoyed writ­ing the arti­cle on why I did­n’t (and still don’t) want a new car. Look­ing back over the arti­cle, I’m so glad I did all that research ahead of time. I recent­ly got my new plates for my car, and it only cost me $89! That was plate AND stick­er fee for a whole year! My last state was a LOT more than that. I was also talk­ing to a friend of mine who got a new car in the last month. Her year­ly stick­er fee is over $200!! It’s lit­tle things like that, that make the dif­fer­ence in sav­ings rates between bud­get and spend­ing con­scious peo­ple and every­one else.

 

I wrote a post on my plan for the next 10 years. In it, I detailed every­thing I think will hap­pen for the next 10 years.

“But Gwen” you say, “How can you plan for the next 10 years of your life? You’re so young! You could get mar­ried, have kids, move away, buy a house.… how can you plan for all that!?”

I real­ly can’t. But, what I can do is cre­ate a pro­jec­tion for the next decade based off what infor­ma­tion I have avail­able. In the 10 odd months since I wrote the arti­cle, things have already changed. And that’s ok. This plan isn’t set in con­crete. I’m not going to dis­solve into hys­ter­ics when things change. For instance, I thought I’d still be rent­ing for this stage of my life and here I am try­ing to buy a house. My antic­i­pat­ed net worth at the end of 2016 was esti­mat­ed to be $103k. Based on some math I did yes­ter­day, I think my net worth will hit almost $115k. (Assum­ing the mar­ket does­n’t plunge any fur­ther and I max out all my accounts). If I keep this up, I won’t need the entire 10 years!

 

In Small Steps to Sav­ings, I equate doing the dish­es to sav­ing for retire­ment. Do the dish­es right away and they’re no prob­lem. Wait and it turns into a huge chore. It’s the same thing with sav­ing for retire­ment. Start out putting as much as you can into your accounts and it’s no big deal. Wait and it’s way more dif­fi­cult to see your pay­check go down. I’ve final­ly bumped up my retire­ment sav­ings to max out my 401k and Roth IRA. It took me almost a year to get up to the cor­rect % and each adjust­ment was painful. Much eas­i­er to do it start­ing off than wait­ing a bit! Oh, and by the way, I still have trou­ble doing my dish­es right after I dirty them. I’ve reached the rinse every­thing thor­ough­ly and put it in the dish­wash­er stage for dish­es, and the rinse every­thing and leave it in a giant stack until I don’t have any more Tup­per­ware con­tain­ers to take lunch to work stage for all the hand dish­es. Slow and steady progress!

 

So there you have it. My first year blog­ging in a very brief nut­shell. Thanks for hang­ing out with me and read­ing all my articles!