10 Years of Blogging… Time for a Lighter Rhythm

10 years ago, on May 6, 2015, I published my first blog post (Are You Ready to Retire Early?). At just over 800 words, it was definitely not as long-winded as I tend to be nowadays! 😂

It wasn’t much – just a sort of intro as I tried to figure out what I wanted my blogging life to be about. Route to Retire has changed a lot since then (hopefully for the better!) and it’s funny to read my old writing and cringe a bit. Nonetheless, that helped kick off a big part of my life.

In that post, I mentioned my plan to retire at 50. I was 39 when I wrote that post, and this was already a pretty ambitious and crazy goal. But somehow, as I continued to learn more and continue to take action, I blew that goal away and was fortunate enough to retire at 43!

I’ve been blogging for 10 years now, 6 of which were after I retired from my career at the end of 2018. I started blogging to have a bridge from my working life to my retirement life. I wanted something consistent to keep me busy and entertained throughout that transition.

It worked. Blogging has been something I’ve done consistently over the past 10 years, and it quickly became a normal part of my life.

I always said I would keep at it until it wasn’t fun. Well, I still enjoy it quite a bit. But here’s the thing… over the past year or so, it’s starting to bring more of a feeling of obligation than excitement. Once I’m writing, life is good. The problem is that I have so many other things keeping me busy that I almost don’t have enough time to keep up with the regular blogging pace anymore.

So, after 10 years of blogging, I’ve decided to cut back tremendously on my posting… wha-wha-what?!!!!

Why cut back on blogging now?

It’s funny – I’ve been considering cutting back on the blogging schedule for a while now, but I decided I would make it to the 10-year mark before making it happen. Apparently, though, I’m not the only one who’s had this on their mind. My good friend, Fritz from The Retirement Manifesto, who started blogging less than a month before I did, just put out a post about a week and a half ago titled I’m Retiring (from full-time blogging).

Look at this guy, always stealing my thunder! 😉

Just kidding, but it is funny to see how we were both thinking the same thing. I mean, what he wrote pretty much sums up most of what I’ve been thinking about for this post.

A couple of months ago, when I decided I would scale back on how often I post, I took a step back to look at my options. I contemplated selling Route to Retire because traffic to the site will go down as I post less often. So now would be one of the best times to sell before my numbers decline.

I actually reached out to another friend from the community, J. Money from https://jmoney.biz/ to discuss the idea. He’s been known to help facilitate the selling of sites like this. He thinks I’d be able to get more for Route to Retire than I thought I would, which would ultimately be a decent chunk of change.

But the more I thought about it (and talked about it with Lisa and Faith), I decided not to do it. Yes, a sale would be a nice little win, but it’s not life-changing money and I think I’d regret it soon after selling.

Route to Retire has been a part of my life for a long time. It’s my baby, as they say!

Guess you’re stuck with me! 🙂

So, why did I decide to cut back big time on blogging now? Honestly, it comes down to being too busy. I know that’s a weird thing for a retiree to say, and we’ve all heard the saying about being busier in retirement than when working, but it’s true. I even cut my workouts down from 5 days a week to 4 a while back simply because it was consuming too much of my time each week.

I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself with deadlines. When I have too many tasks on my plate, I start to get frustrated and stressed. Yes, I’m retired, and yes, this might sound somewhat silly. But to me, it’s not. I always have a ton of stuff I’m working on and blogging is one area I can free up some time.

Right now, the two most time-consuming things in my life are traveling for a third of the year and a big self-hosting project I’m working on. The latter is something I need to put my mind to and focus on because it’s a lot of unknowns for me. I’m a technical guy, but I’ve already had to learn areas that were unfamiliar to me (Linux server, Docker, specialized security software, etc.). It’s been a fulfilling project so far, but it’s taken a ridiculous amount of my time because I want to ensure I do it right and securely.

This builds more off my Privacy and Security: The Essential Guide to Reclaiming Your Digital Life post I wrote about previously. I’ll fill you in more on it once it’s done.

We’re here in Boquete, Panama right now for a month and I don’t want to be thinking about blogging – I want to be taking in every moment here that I can. The same goes for our 38-night trip to Europe. I want to focus on the moment more than writing about that or other things.

Things like this only scratch the surface, but they do take up a lot of time. And there’s a new excitement there as well as with other things I want to be learning and doing, so I want to allocate more time to them. For example, I want to put a bigger priority on being outdoors more (walking, hiking, biking, etc.), especially once the self-hosting project is done. And spending hours blogging doesn’t necessarily cater to that desire.

We’re also rounding out the time we get to spend with Faith. If you remember, one of the driving forces for my early retirement in the first place was to be with her more as she grew up. Mission accomplished. I hope she’s enjoyed the time with us as much as we have with her, but now she’s almost 15. We’re already seeing that time together thinning a lot more as she spends more time hanging out with friends (or chatting with them). And, of course, that will just continue to become even greater with each passing day.

College is around the corner. I mentioned in my last post that there’s a chance she’ll head to North Carolina for school and, happily, we might move nearby if that happens. Even so, the smart money would be on realizing that we’ll see her a crazy amount less once she starts college. That’s life, and it’s a good thing (I don’t have to like it!! 😉 ), but I want to continue to relish the time we have until she’s moved on to her next chapter. Plus, living in North Carolina sounds pretty good, too!

So, I’m moving blogging from being an obligation on the schedule to something with a little less priority.

So, when will you post?

When I first started blogging, I wrote and published 6 posts in the first month. I quickly realized that wasn’t gonna fly and decided on a weekly schedule (with an occasional extra post here and there). That worked well for me because consistency and I tend to be BFFs.

But eventually, that took its toll on me as well. In 2021, after 6 years of blogging, I wrote the post, Giving Myself Permission To Breathe, and then shifted to blogging every other week. Funny enough, Fritz was a help in talking through the blogging burnout back then.

So here we are today, 10 years of blogging down the road, and it’s time for me to recognize that this current blogging schedule needs to go. It worked great over the past few years, but it’s time for a change.

As Fritz had mentioned in his post, all too often, we’ve seen personal finance bloggers suddenly disappear off the map, sometimes with their entire blog vanishing as well. I don’t want to go down that path.

I plan to continue posting whenever two stars align:

• I’ve got something worthwhile to share with you
• I’ve got time to write a post

Honestly, even after 10 years of blogging, I still have a ton of stuff I’d love to share with you. I keep a note with blog ideas and it’s still crazy long. Now I’ll need to be even pickier about what I decide to write about since I’ll be posting less often. So really, it comes down to the second bullet point.

Here’s the difference in what I was doing compared to what I’m going to do now… I’m no longer having a set schedule in place. This is tough for me because I’m schedule-oriented and it makes me a little nervous that things could fall by the wayside, but I’ll put a valiant effort into keeping that from happening. I don’t want to be one of the fallen bloggers out there.

I considered saying that you could anticipate that I would be putting out a new blog post every XXX times a XXX… but I decided not to do that. That still caters to a set schedule and that’s exactly what I want to avoid.

So, you’ll just need to check back periodically to see the latest posts… or, if you want to do it the smart way, you can subscribe to the blog.

My email list is the best place to stay in the loop and know when new posts come out. If you’re already on it, you’re golden – now’s not the time to jump ship. But if you’re not subscribed, it’s time to make that happen so you don’t miss it when the new posts come out.

Plus, of course, I’ll send you a welcome email with a bunch of cool freebie spreadsheet tools I’ve created and use routinely that I think you’ll appreciate, including:

• Recurring Expenses Spreadsheet (discussed in This Bad-@#$ Expenses Spreadsheet is My Gift to You)
• Credit Card Rewards Tracker (discussed in Travel Rewards – 12 Free Flights Earned in 9 Months!)
• Portfolio Rebalancing Spreadsheet (discussed in Portfolio Rebalancing: Get Your Asset Allocation in Line)
• HSA Unreimbursed Expenses Tracking Spreadsheet (discussed in Using Your HSA for Retirement – How to Track It Easily and Efficiently)
• Roth IRA Conversion Ladder Calculator (discussed in The Roth IRA Conversion Ladder Dilemma)
• Alcohol Tracker (discussed in Alcohol Tracking – I Spent Hours Creating This Spreadsheet I Hope to Use Very Little)
• Next-Chapter Matrix / Bucket List (discussed in Creating Your Dream Life: The Ultimate Bucket List Blueprint)
• Upcoming Credit Card Bills Tracker (discussed in My Game-Changing Spreadsheet to Track Upcoming Credit Card Bills)
• Roth IRA Funds Available Now (discussed in Roth IRA Withdrawals for Early Retirees: Tracking What’s Accessible Now)

Cool, right? So hop on the mailing list here to get the hookup!

With that, my friends, I hope you’ve enjoyed my posts over the past decade and will continue to enjoy them in the future, albeit a little less often!

In the meantime, you can always see all of my past posts (this one marks number 497!!!) on my Archives page.

Plan well, take action, and live your best life!

Thanks for reading!!

— Jim