Rant N Rave: Conforming and Credit Cards

Rant:

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a cou­ple of good top­ics to both Rant and Rave about. Today’s Rant is brought to you cour­tesy of the Fin­Con Face­book group I joined.  Let me pref­ace this: I’m very excit­ed to go to Fin­Con and I can­not wait to go learn a ton of real­ly great stuff and meet lots of great peo­ple.  How­ev­er, I will say this: some of my fel­low blog­gers are hel­la intense. If you are a blog­ger who does any of the things I’ve list­ed below, please take this in the fun spir­it I intend and don’t get offend­ed. Keep on doin what you’re doing. The posts do look very love­ly and polished.

Wel­come to today’s Rant!

The final­ists for the Plu­tus Awards were announced recent­ly and I noticed a com­mon theme among the top blogs. All of them had images like the one above. Pret­ty back­ground, title of the post, and their URL at the bot­tom. Had some com­mon stan­dard hap­pened while I napped? Actu­al­ly.….. kind of.

There is a blog­ger (or two) that does the meta thing and posts ‘How to Start a Blog’ and ‘How to Increase Your Traf­fic’. There are also a few Pin­ter­est experts who will help you uti­lize the site to increase traf­fic. Turns out, Pin­ter­est is actu­al­ly still used by peo­ple. A lot of peo­ple. And if you have these cute share­able images, those hoards of peo­ple perus­ing Pin­ter­est will flock to your site and you’ll make tons of mon­ey! Enough to quit your job! And then you get to link to an arti­cle you wrote called ‘How Blog­ging Helped Me Quit My Ter­ri­ble Cubi­cle Job!’.

ICK.

Isn’t there more to blog­ging than exploit­ing your read­er base for a living?

No? Ok then. Here’s anoth­er pret­ty share­able picture.

Let’s learn how to stack your sav­ings togeth­er with one easy step! Title of the arti­cle? Check. Some­what rel­e­vant pic­ture? Check. (That came from my trip to Maine this week­end. Can you see the tiny light­house in the mid­dle of the back­ground?) URL at the bot­tom? Check.

I, too, can dri­ve all the traf­fic to my blog and make mil­lions of dol­lars! All you have to do is click on all the affil­i­ate links scat­tered around the post and the mon­ey will start pour­ing in!

I’m real­ly rant­i­ng today. Just get­ting started.

I start­ed blog­ging to share my sto­ry and hope­ful­ly inspire oth­er mil­len­ni­als that this crazy FIRE lifestyle is not only pos­si­ble, but incred­i­bly easy to do. I did­n’t set out to get a full time job. I did­n’t set out to make a nice stream of pas­sive income from oth­er peo­ple click­ing links every oth­er sen­tence. I sup­pose I’m lucky in that I don’t have any debt play­ing goril­la on my back so I don’t have to do any of the typ­i­cal blog stuff. Like anoth­er picture!

I have no idea why any­one would want to make their life like a pine tree, but appar­ent­ly peo­ple love pret­ty images. Side­note: that was the sky one morn­ing as I went to work. I love liv­ing in the Mid­west sometimes.

One rea­son I don’t want to have ads and affil­i­ate links on my blog is I feel a bit like I’m sell­ing out. What is my motive to blog? Is it to help peo­ple start their path to FIRE? Is it to show it can be done?

Or is it to earn money?

I already do some­thing every day to earn mon­ey and I hate it. I hate being oblig­at­ed to my employ­er to work on their stuff.

I don’t want that to hap­pen with this blog. This blog is an escape for me. A relief, even. Here I can be myself and say what­ev­er I want to say. Poke fun at my fel­low blog­gers? Check. Swear? Some­times. Share amaz­ing pic­tures and sto­ries of my expe­ri­ences? YOU BETCHA. I’m afraid of my style being cramped. Of hav­ing some­one tell me “Don’t do that or you won’t get any mon­ey this month.” I don’t want my blog to look or feel like every­one else’s. It can be dif­fi­cult because there’s A) lots of peo­ple blog­ging nowa­days and B) we have some­what of a lim­it­ed topic.

I’d rather put in 80% of the work and be hap­py with the results I’m get­ting. I could always, always push for more, but the rab­bit hole nev­er ends. When is enough enough? Nev­er. This is where I want to be and if my traf­fic stays at rough­ly 70 views per day, then I’m hap­py to be writ­ing for those 70 peo­ple. Or 3 peo­ple read­ing a lot of my posts at once. Or some com­bi­na­tion of the two.

Rave:

Now for an actu­al seri­ous Rave.

I’m so happy!

I got my new Chase Sap­phire Reserve card last week and it’s beautiful!

Check it out for yourself:

I man­aged to score one of the fan­cy bond­ed met­al cards. It’s been so pop­u­lar they ran out and had to give out plain ol plas­tic cards!! Chase has said they were absolute­ly blown away by the response, but it’s not every day they give out 100k UR points so I don’t know why they’re so surprised.

I got it just in time to pre­pay my rent for the next few months and to be able to pay for any­thing on my trip to Maine. (Not that I spent a lot of mon­ey whilst on the trip woot woot!)

I will have a more in-depth post on what this card means to me and my churn­ing goals, but for now I’m just cel­e­brat­ing how awe­some this card is. I’ll get my Pres­tige Pass in the mail some­time this week, which means I’ll be able to enjoy fan­cy lounges on my trips to Fin­Con and Lon­don! I love free WiFi and snacks. I did­n’t get the pass in the mail in time for my trip to Maine, but I had the USO to go to so I made it through the trip just fine. Minus the small intesti­nal prob­lems from eat­ing the free snacks full of gluten haha.

Now I just have to face the fact I’ll have to pay off every­thing at the end of the month 🙁 The dark side to putting every­thing on your card, I suppose!

Do you like the pinnable images above? Do you have a rant or a rave to share? Let me hear it!