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Post a CommentI’m doing two part interviews with bloggers on two of my personal sites. I’m excited to have Philip from Wise Bread answer a few of my questions on this new project.
The first part is here on Green Panda Treehouse. The second part is on Vega Baja Productions, where Philip taks a bit more on blogging.
If you’re a blogger and wouldn’t mind being interviewed, please feel free to contact me.
Philip, could you tell us a little about yourself?
These days, I think of myself as a writer. My undergraduate degree is in Economics, and I worked for twenty-five years as a software engineer, but writing was what I wanted to do even then. (Although I also enjoyed the software work, especially early on. I’m old enough that I can remember when a computer was two or three refrigerator-sized boxes that no ordinary person could afford. When I started my first job I remember thinking, “I hope they don’t figure out that I’d work for free, just to get access to the computer.”)
As I write this, I’m attending the annual convention the national Esperanto organization in the US. I’ve gotten up early to answer your questions, as I found when I tried to write my answers yesterday I was thinking in Esperanto and having to translate back into English–which didn’t make me sound particularly articulate.
You’ve made the transition from being a programmer/writer to become a full fledged writer and blog about personal finance at Wise Bread. How did you prepare for the transition?
When I was doing it, I was thinking of it as preparing to retire early. I wanted to spend my time writing, but didn’t expect that I’d earn enough money from the writing to make a significant contribution to my income. So, for at least 20 years, I’d been saving an investing with an eye toward early retirement. That was going along okay, although I was still a couple years away from having even a minimal retirement portfolio. (And, given how the market actually performed over those couple of years, considerably farther than that.)
As it gradually became clear that I probably wasn’t going to be able stick to my job for that long, I started exploring other possibilities, and the idea that I might earn a modest amount of money from my writing as an attractive one.
Based on your personal experience, what advice would you give to bloggers who want to be full time writers?
It’s an old joke among writers that anyone can making a living as a full-time writer, if you include earnings from writing-related work such as teaching writing–or waiting tables.
On this topic in particular, I’m perpetually torn. The path I took (work at a job that I gradually lost interest in until I saved up almost enough money to retire) worked for me, but I hesitate to recommend it. Much better, I think, is to find work that that you love that earns enough money to support you (even if you can’t live as lavishly as before).
Either path, though, is enormously helped by frugal living. If you can live cheaply enough, you can choose your work based on what you feel to be your true calling in life. But, even if you take the other path (working at whatever pays the most), serious frugality lets you save a lot more money. It also acts as a test as to whether you’ll be happy with the modest standard of living that being a full-time writer entails for all but a handful of wonderfully successful writers.
What are your favorite personal finance books?
I like Your Money or Your Life, particularly because it happened to appear at a point in my life where its message especially spoke to me.
Less important for me personally, simply because it didn’t come out early enough to have much influence on me when it really mattered, but perhaps the best book in terms of laying out the details of exactly the style of living that I’ve chosen, is Work Less, Live More. As I said in my review of it, “It reads like the author started following me around a year ago, figured out exactly what questions I needed answered, then carefully and thoughtfully wrote a book to answer them.”
For the “investing” side of personal finance, The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need covers the essential topics–including the less sexy but important ones like insurance–very well. It has the added advantage of being pretty funny.
If you received a tax free $10,000 check, how would you spend/save it?
For me, receiving money and spending money are almost completely disconnected. Spending is based on my budget and changes in income don’t affect my spending (expect when they suggest that my budget is unrealistic). So, the short answer is that I’d treat it exactly like all my other money.
The slightly longer answer is that I’m holding rather more cash than I otherwise would, while I wait for the economic situation to sort itself out. In particular, I can’t remember the last time I was so uncertain about the future course of inflation–something that will strongly influence the future course of interest rates and the economy in general. I’m really interested in seeing how the actions of the Fed (and other central banks) during the past couple of years play out, and until I do I hesitate to commit much more money to stocks or bonds.
What topic do you notice your readers gravitate towards?
There’s a core group of readers who seem to appreciate my message of frugality as a means for ordinary people to achieve freedom. They’re interested in both tactical ideas (how to spend less) and more strategic ideas (how to live a frugal life in the face of the wider consumer culture).
Another group of readers seem to be interested in what used to be called “political economy.” There’s a broad cross section of political viewpoints there, with plenty of libertarians, but also plenty of progressives who advocate that the government weigh in to help people in trouble. I hope they enjoy the discussions in the comments section of my posts as much as I do. (I feel particularly lucky that my readers are uniformly polite and civil in those discussions.)
There are other groups–people interested in self-sufficiency, people interested in DIY, and so on. I appreciate them all.
One of the most interesting things about blogging is the visibility I have into what my readers care about. I suppose it was very different for people who wrote, let’s say, a syndicated newspaper column in the days before the internet.
What’s the most important/practical financial tip someone should remember?
Don’t assume that anything in your life is fixed and unchangeable. Except for the decision to have a family, every decision that you’ve made can be made anew. You can change jobs and even careers. You can go back to school. You can move to a new house–or new country.
If you’ve spent years following one path, it’s easy to assume that you’ve gone too far to choose another–and because of that, some people hesitate to take a big step like giving up a job that pays well for one that they’d love. But I don’t think it’s true. There is no point in your life when you can’t strike off in a new direction if you want to.
All you have to do is think deeply about what you really want, and then start to arrange your life so that you get more of what you want most, and less of everything else.
Please subscribe to Wise Bread and chat with Philip on Twitter.
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[...] The first part is here on my freelance blog at Vega Baja Productions and the second will be on Green Panda Treehouse. This week I had the wonderful chance of interviewing Philip from Wise [...]
[...] Up on Green Panda Treehouse is an interview where I talk about personal finance and the path I took to being a personal finance blogger. [...]