Top 5 Reasons I Started and Continue A Personal Finance Blog

Early last week, Lazy Man at Lazy Man and Money shared 10 ways personal finance blogging has helped him to get better financially. Looking back at the short history of this blog, I found myself also a beneficiary of blogging. So what are the reasons to get me into blogging in the first place?

1. Nothing is possible without passion

If you ask me what’s the one single reason I start this blog, my answer will be: I LOVE finance. I care about our financial well-being and like to discuss with other about investing. When I stumbled upon a personal finance blog for the first time last June, it was like a window to the new world of finance to me. I have heard about weblogs and have been tracking my money from day one, but I never thought about combining these two together with my own blog. After reading personal finance blogs for a month, I just couldn’t resist the temptation of setting up one for myself. Back then, I had two objectives on my mind: Share what I know and learn what I don’t know. Nine months into blogging, this blog is now my biggest hobby and I am enjoying it every day.

2. Holding myself accountable for all financial decisions

If you go through the archives of this blog, you will find that most of the posts are about what I do on saving and investing. It’s more about my personal (yes, that’s the personal part of this blog) experience than telling other people that I don’t know what to do (I don’t qualify for giving advice anyway). Since I know I will expose all my financial decisions to the public through this blog, I now think more thoroughly before making a move, weighing the pros and cons and evaluating possible consequences. This helps me make better judgement on my own investments.

3. Enriching myself by reading more

One limit of being very personal with a blog is that sometimes it seems there aren’t a lot exciting things to write about. In order to come up with fresh ideas when the personal part runs low, I force myself to read more books and articles on finance to gain insights on what other people are thinking on the same topic and how they are doing. Besides, I don’t want to sound I don’t know what I am talking about when writing a post on investing, though I still make this and that mistakes. Without this blog, I can use all kinds of excuses to not to pickup a book.

4. Interactive with people, another learning process

I am a long time visitor of Morningstar’s Diehard forum and what I like about the forum is that there are many knowledgeable people in real life who are willing to share their experience and answer your questions now matter how simple they seem to be. This blog gives me the exact platform I want to be interactive with people on various issues in personal finance. I consider this a mutually beneficial learning process. Yes, I can always read books from gurus, but the personal touch from this blog making the learning even more valuable and rewarding.

5. A little side income for the long run

When I started this blog, the idea of making money from it didn’t occurred to me. As the site grows, it started to bring in a little extra cash every month. If I spend the money, it probably won’t make any difference in our life right now. Considering the time I spent on this site, I want to make the money, though a very small amount, special. So instead of treating it just as a number in our checking account, I used the income from this site to fund our daughter’s 529 plan since the beginning of this year. By the time our daughter goes to college, I want to tell her that her Dad supports her education by staying late every night when she was only two years old, :)).

Of course, networking with people and developing writing and analyzing skills are also handy reasons for me to continue blogging, but since Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net has limited it to only top five to participate in his latest Top 5 Group Writing Project, I will just stop here.

Now, do you feel you want to have your own personal finance blog as well?

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