Welcome to Impersonal Finances, where personal finance need not be so personal. Just random financial musings from an impersonal fellow.

Why Impersonal Finances?

Because that’s the thing about personal finance—it’s always so personal. Everybody has a unique financial situation specific to them, but when discussed, things very quickly become personal for all the wrong reasons. Relax, control what you can control, and don’t take it so personally. It’s difficult to talk to friends and family about money, so most of us remain in the dark on important financial topics that, for whatever reason, aren’t included in the standard education curriculum.

That, and because personalfinance.com was already taken. For that matter, so was impersonalfinance.com. Damn you Steve Adcock!

Enter Impersonal Finances

Why contribute to a personal finance blog to begin with?

Lockdown boredom? Yes. Fear of the current health and financial climate? Yes. Lack of personal finance bloggers with consistently good, engaging, informative content? Well, no. To name very few, there’s Mr. Money Mustache, Budgets Are Sexy, Afford Anything, JL Collins, and several hundred others I’ve discovered on my own path to becoming a personal finance nerd. But for some reason you wound up in my corner of the internet, so here we are. Please visit any of those aforementioned sites for much better and more plentiful information. Just don’t expect that things will be so impersonal as they are here, you know, at Impersonal Finances.

It’s a flooded market in the personal finance space. But that’s OK. Until every single person has their personal finances in order, there will never be enough personal finance content.

I don’t remember the first money blog I stumbled upon, but I know that it led to me finding more, and reading more, and learning more. Even if that first blog didn’t teach me anything at all, it helped get me somewhere that could. If you’d never heard of any of those aforementioned sites before, I’ve already done my part. And there are plenty more out there. If this can serve as your gateway personal finance blog, then you’re off to a great start.

Why is personal finance always so personal?

Why is it so difficult to communicate about money in a non-judgmental manner? It might seem like it now in the age of the internet, but money has long been seen as a taboo topic. Even with the influx of personal finance blogs, you still need to go out of your own way to seek out information. The onus is on the individual to educate themselves, and frankly, not all individuals thrive at self-education. You’re either independently informed or accidentally ignorant, and it’s difficult to broach the subject–even with close friends and relatives–when neither of you is sure which category the other falls into.

What say you, Meg Ryan?

What is so wrong with being personal anyway?

Blogging as a side hustle

The other thing about all these personal finance bloggers—dirty little secret here—they almost all monetize their personal finance blogs. Whether it’s through advertising, affiliate marketing, or straight-up selling their websites, most of your soon-to-be favorite personal finance bloggers do in fact get paid (at least a few bucks) for the valuable information and entertainment they provide. Multiple revenue streams and side hustles are the gospel, and I am a natural born follower.

As a result, you’ll sometimes run into affiliate links for products that might not otherwise be endorsed by the parties involved. Conflicts of interest are hard to avoid. For that reason, we’ll stick to monetizing with annoying Adsense ads that hopefully aren’t too annoying, and links to Amazon products that are discussed on these pages, which are usually just books.

Are blogs some kind of get-rich-quick scheme? No—believe me, I’ve tried. They’ll actually cost you money at the start, and they’re a total time suck. But if you don’t mind writing and are bored and/or distracting yourself from the anxiety of the current state of affairs, it’s a good way to eventually earn enough spare change to buy your friends a few beers and then annoy them about your personal finance blog.

Welcome, then, to this most impersonal blog about personal finance, where I’m here to blog about money while trying to make money from blogging about money. I’ll try to keep it somewhat entertaining and touch on some topics that might not always be front of mind in the personal finance community.