I am a huge believer in blog transparency, so I’ve created this page to be super clear about all the types of things you, as the reader, have a right to know, chiefly:

• Our financial situation and how we saved to retire early
• How money works on this blog (TL;DR: This blog does not make any money, by design)
• How money works on my other projects (books, podcasts, speaking, etc.)

I’ve been outspoken about the problems with blogger transparency (or lack thereof), which you can read here:

• Don’t Listen to Us // Blogs Don’t Tell the Full FI Story
• What FIRE Bloggers Owe Readers // A Blogging Manifesto

The big picture/TL;DR on all of this is:

We were able to retire early on a much faster timeline than most people can thanks to circumstances in our favor (though you don’t need to share our circumstances to retire early, your timeline might just be longer),

and

Nothing in our financial plan requires any post-retirement income from work or other projects, so anything we earn now (which we don’t chase, and none of which comes from this blog) is gravy. 

Our Finances and How We Saved

We retired from our careers at the end of 2017 with enough saved to never need to work again. Which is not the same thing as saying we never will work again, because humans are wired to contribute to our communities and society. But that choice will never be driven by money, and we have the luxury of turning down or walking away from anything that’s not fun and aligned to our life purpose.

In terms of how much we saved, I don’t share our actual numbers, for reasons I wrote about in these posts (TL;DR: privacy):

• Why We Don’t Talk Numbers
• On Still Not Sharing (Most of) Our Numbers // Talking Finance With No Finances
• Not Fostering Comparison // Are We the Joneses?

But I do share a ton of charts showing our progress over time and total retirement savings in percentage terms, including this one, in which “X” is a year’s worth of spending:

See the full set of charts representing our assets and saving progress over time in this post:

• The Full Financial Breakdown at Early Retirement

The most important thing to be completely transparent about is that we were able to save quickly for early retirement (six years from setting early retirement as a goal to leaving our careers) almost entirely because we had high incomes in our later working years. We both started our careers earning under $30,000 a year in DC, an expensive city, but we had a series of promotions and bonuses that added up over time, as I discussed in this post:

• The Power of Compounding — In Our Incomes

In our last several earning years, we were in the top 3% of U.S. households in terms of earnings, and it’s vastly easier to save a lot if you earn a lot. We also don’t have children and were never saddled with massive student debt that would have slowed us down. But I also had a negative net worth until my late 20s:

• Don’t Get Discouraged by Slow Initial Progress // A Blast from My Financial Past

And neither Mark nor I grew up with significant money or have inherited money. In fact, I grew up with a single disabled parent reliant on government assistance, though thanks to that assistance, my life looked solidly middle class:

• How Subsidies Make Early Retirement Possible

Thanks in part to that supportive upbringing, I earned a full ride to college (Mark got a half ride and his parents paid for the rest), and came out with only about $10,000 in loans for living expenses:

• Of Boosts and Bootstraps // One Story, Two Ways

We also were in the fortunate position of being able to buy our house in 2011, near the bottom of the real estate market during the Great Recession, which is why we were able to pay it off in under 5 1/2 years, something that would take far longer if we were paying today’s prices:

• Minimizing Your Housing Costs // Don’t Let the Banks Set Your Budget

Though we don’t require it to make our early retirement financial plan work, and we haven’t done any of it for the money, we have done some paid work and earned some money in retirement. (Keep reading for more on that.) But we are now living entirely off of our investments, just as we’d planned to.

Money on Our Next Life

This may surprise you, but this blog does not make a penny.

I have no problem with bloggers earning money from their blogs, especially because I know exactly how big a time commitment it is to maintain a blog. But I choose not to earn money here, even though it would be easy to do so at this point. This may surprise you, but this blog does not make a penny. Our Next Life is a money-losing proposition by design. First, I don’t like mixing creativity and money, because that sucks the joy out of it, so keeping Our Next Life ad-free keeps it fun for me. Second, ads would ruin the visual experience on the site and sponsored posts would erode trust I’ve worked to build with readers. Third, bringing money into the equation makes it hard to know if you’re recommending something because you truly love it, or because you have a financial incentive to love it. Might I love services that offer an affiliate kick-back more if I was thinking about how much each click would pay me? Quite possibly. So I just avoid that question altogether by not doing any of these things. If I recommend something, it’s with no financial interest in that thing. (Exception: my book. Keep reading.)

The one thing I have done since 2018 is use affiliate links for the books I recommend, and on the links page that lists my recommended books, I include this language, which states that I use affiliate links solely to partially cover blog expenses:

*Here’s the deal with those links…

…because I feel strongly about blogger transparency.

Our Next Life is not monetized, for a whole bunch of reasons. However, there are some large costs involved with operating the blog and newsletter that make this an expensive hobby, one that’s hard to justify on a retired budget. The books I recommend include affiliate links, and the revenue from them (at most around $.50 per book purchased) covers a small fraction of the out-of-pocket costs of providing ad-free, unsponsored content to you at no charge. My aim with the affiliate links is — absolute best case — to break even on out-of-pocket expenses, so that providing this content isn’t a money pit for us. But here’s my commitment: In any calendar year in which affiliate income fully covers the cost of web hosting, photo editing and email list maintenance (the latter is the biggest expense by far!), I will donate all earnings above and beyond expenses to charity directly or to our donor advised fund for charitable giving, for the remainder of that year. (This has never happened in six years!) And of course I’m thrilled if you go check these books out at the library instead!

My recurring costs to keep the blog running, not counting travel to FinCon or other events, currently total about $150 a month, a number that continues to increase. Over the life of the blog (founded in January 2015), I’ve made less than $1000 total but spent thousands.

Money on Other Projects

In addition to this blog, I wrote two books, do a little podcasting, occasionally do some public speaking, and both Mark and I have done some limited work for former clients (though only in our first post-retirement year, not since then). Unlike Our Next Life, we do make money on these things, though probably less than you think.

Work Optional (book) — I earned a book advance for writing Work Optional, half of which I received in 2018 (first retired year), and the other half came in 2019 (second year). Here’s my answer on book money that I shared in my behind-the-scenes post the day the book was published:

I’m not allowed to share money stuff, but it’s safe to say that book advances are rarely a life-changing amount of money. Here’s a good article that gets into how advances work, and the sizes they tend to be. Here’s another. And in truth I haven’t calculated how many books I need to sell to earn out my advance, but I do need the book to sell if I want to write more. If I earn out the advance, any royalties will go directly to charity or our donor advised fund, so I won’t personally earn anything.

I’m not counting on royalties and would love for the book to do well enough that I earn them, so that I can donate them and increase our charitable giving. I never want promoting the book to be about money for me, for the same reasons this blog isn’t monetized. I have no issue with authors making money off of their books, and in fact think most authors are vastly undercompensated, but I don’t want the drive for more money to be my motivation to write, especially because we already have enough.

Wallet Activism (book) — For my second book, I chose to forgo an advance from my publisher. Whether and how much I make from the book will depend entirely on how well it sells, and I’ll update this after that’s a bit clearer. I will certainly be making a charitable giving commitment for this book as well.

Wallet Activism (podcast) — My new podcast has no sponsors or affiliates by design, and it never will. It’s an entirely money-losing operation because podcasting comes with some significant costs.

The Fairer Cents (podcast)— The podcast I co-hosted had sponsors from episode one, something my co-host and I appreciated, because podcasting is even more expensive than blogging, and unlike me, my cohost isn’t financially independent and needs her projects to be worthwhile financially, which I fully support. We’ve sought sponsors for that reason, but like book advances, podcast money is relatively small. In season one, our sponsorship covered expenses and that was about it. The show grew each season, but I used the money I made from the show to cover podcast and blog expenses, so there’s no net profit.

Speaking — I do a very limited amount of paid public speaking, at most three to four times a year, though much of the speaking I do is not only unpaid, I also pay out-of-pocket to travel. If I have earned income in a year, it’s most likely from speaking, something I love doing and would (and do) happily do for free.

Financial Writing Elsewhere — I have a very occasional column on MarketWatch, which really just means that I write pieces for them when I feel inspired, which is a few times a year, and they pay me a small freelance fee for each one. It could be a nice supplement to our spending if I did it often, but I don’t. Most articles by me on the site are syndicated from the blog, meaning I wrote them for Our Next Life and they ran first here, and then MarketWatch reposted slightly edited versions. When that happens, I don’t get paid, which is standard syndication practice. You’re “paid” in links back to your site and perhaps a little extra web traffic, which could mean more money if I had ads here, but I don’t.

Financial Services Consulting — A few times over the years, I have provided one-time consulting for financially-oriented companies, for example, providing input into a new retirement savings target calculator or providing input into making events more inclusive. I have only agreed to these arrangements with the stipulation that I not be expected to plug the product. In total, I have earned about $2,000 through these projects.

Cents Positive — In 2018 and 2019, I organized financial independence retreats for women. While women paid to attend, their payment went entirely to cover out-of-pocket expenses of the event and speaker travel. I didn’t make money off the events, again, entirely by design.

Work Work — Since retiring, I have done one very small project for a former client in our first year of retired, and only because I liked them a lot. Mark did a handful of small projects that first year, too, mostly because he had the opportunity to do work that aligned to his passions and purpose, not because of the money. His work, though short-term and limited in nature, paid for nearly all of our expenses in year 1 of our early retirement.

As of 2021, our fourth year of early retirement, we are earning at most a few thousand dollars from everything above, and are living off of our investments as we’d always planned. We earn dividends on our taxable (phase 1) investments, we earn interest on our cash holdings, and we come out about even on our single rental property (that will go cash flow positive in about 8 years when we pay off that mortgage, which is by design).

Any Other Questions?

Have any questions on transparency that aren’t answered here? Ask them in the comments, and I’ll answer publicly so anyone interested can see.

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