You must be living under a personal finance rock, if you have not heard of the blog featured today. Yes, I am indeed talking about Budgets Are Sexy. While it’s not like I had not heard of J. Money or his sexy blog earlier, my methodology so far for any blog that I feature has been to read the blog end-to-end, comment on many of them and understand the psychology and the route taken by the blogger. However, that’s clearly not possible in a short span of time for some of the blogs.
J. Money started his blog way back in February 2008, which means he’s approaching a decade of diligently posting content on his blog. By diligently I mean a grand total of 2340 posts through 118 months averaging a cool 19.8 posts every month! That’s more than 1 blog post every 2 days for almost 10 years. If that’s not commitment, then I don’t know what is.
Clearly, the amount of content that he has created is also providing value to a lot of people. Consistently ranked as one of the top personal finance blogs, in 2016 alone, the site got over 5 million views and almost 4 million visitors.
I do believe the Follow Friday series would be incomplete without featuring a few people, one of them being J. Money. So, admittedly for the first time I have taken a short-cut to read through only his self-admitted most popular or most favourite posts for a few years.
What I love about it:
The website design is pretty basic as compared to a lot of others out there but the content more than makes up for it.
J. Money is quite funny (and it rhymes!) through most of his blog posts, effortlessly so
J.Money comes across as this fun, humorous, sarcastic and often self-deprecating guy. In this manner, I believe he is able to get more people to rally around him to really pay attention to their money (which is also his stated objective). If I had to put it in another way, he puts the Fun in Finance.
Sample this:
- Managing Money is like riding a bike – you fall down a ton early on, but the more you practice the better you get. You’ll still fall afterwards, but usually only because you’re trying to be slick 😉
- The reason I’m not retired early yet? My kids. Haha… Just kidding. My wife! (Somebody stop me!).
- And as much as my keypad is forcing me not to type this out right now… I just… can’t…. resist… It’s – what – Makes – Peroesfsonl – Financnace – PERSoNAL!!!!!! (*keyboard goes on strike*)
- There’s a reason I slipped “sexy” in my blog name all those years ago, haha… Would you have ever clicked on BudgetingIsPrudent.com? I don’t think so. That’s lame. I had to get you to click first, and then after hook you with my clever financialness 😉
- You know what’s awesome? Dreaming about all the things you’d do if you won the lottery. You know what’s kinda-sorta-but-not-really ALSO awesome? Dreaming up all the things your family can do when you die and leave them all that life insurance money 😉
- Write a real-life letter to someone, using cursive and all (don’t you dare say you don’t know what cursive is, you millennials…)
- I had a great schedule going once, but then I had a kid. Then I got a new pretty good schedule down, and then I had a 2nd kid 🙂
One big post:
One of the best personal finance books I remember reading is – The Millionaire Next Door. The book does a great job of showing how the prudence with which you spend is really the factor which can predict whether you will be a millionaire, rather than how much you earn. The author makes a very good point about how some of the most unassuming people are really millionaires while the most flashy ones are mired in debt.
Most millionaires (by net worth) are conspicuous, and don’t really give in to such extravagance
There are loads and loads of Budgets Are Sexy Posts that I enjoyed. Once I got into the labyrinth of the inter-linked posts, it was proving to be pretty difficult to stop the binging. What’s also cool is how he manages to bring out posts, literally from thin air. My favourite post – 11 tips from my new millionaire friend – was inspired by just one comment!
In this post, J highlights a comment that he got on another post which seems to personify the book – The Millionaire Next Door. Craftily he breaks down a 7-sentence comment into 11 pieces of advice that he saw in it. Yeah, we bloggers tend to get more preachy with time 🙂
Other 2 favourite posts:
You can e-meet him through his blog, email, Twitter or Facebook
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