MIC and FinCon and Podcasts, oh my!

Oh boy. It’s been a busy few weeks. Let’s recap!

Before you get nervous, I promise there will be some actionable tips scattered throughout this post. It’s not just me talking about my life, I promise!

MIC: September 23-25

I flew to Orlando early Sunday, September 23rd. Like, early early. I-almost-missed-my-flight early. I had a layover in Houston, which I was pretty excited about because I was planning to visit the Centurion Lounge. The sweet, sweet lounge I get free access to because I have an AMEX Platinum card (no annual fee for military in active status!). The lounge with actual good food and comfortable chairs.

But it was not to be.

There are TWO count them TWO major airports in Houston. I, uh, didn’t realize this. Only one of them has a Centurion Lounge, and it’s called George Bush International Airport. I flew into William P. Hobby Airport, which has a grand total of zero lounges. There is a USO, which was inexplicably closed even though I was there during the posted open hours and there was no sign explaining why it was closed. So no lounge access for me. I bought a slice of pizza instead (it was pretty good – Barry’s Pizza near Gate 21).

Tip: Houston Hobby does have a smokin’ deal for massages. They have an XpresSpa, which is not the deal. At XpresSpa, a sitting massage from a human is $42 for 15 minutes (!!!) and $20 for a 15 minute chair massage. Avoid that. Go to the massage chairs scattered throughout the terminal, which are the high-end type you find for thousands of dollars at Brookstone. You know, the ones that are filled with people “testing” them at the mall but nobody buys because who buys a $2000 chair??? Those massage chairs, which are placed every hundred yards or so at Houston Hobby, are:

• $1 for 3 minutes
• $2 for 10 minutes
• $5 for 31 minutes

And that price includes the leg massage, too! I got a 10 minute massage on my outbound and return trips. Totally worth it. I plan to keep my eye out for these chairs on future trips. What a perfect way to recover from a cross country flight!

Good pizza + cheap, good massage chair completely made up for not getting to go to the Centurion Lounge.

Military Influencer Conference

I suppose I should talk about what I was flying to, eh?

My first event in Orlando was the Military Influencer Conference (MIC). This is an event for current military members, veterans, military spouses, and others to gather and talk about…well, how to be an influencer. Mostly what that means is being an entrepreneur of some type, although it wasn’t only entrepreneurs.

If you are passionate about the military community, a veteran looking to build a brand, a milspouse looking to grow a home-based business, a military member separating in the next couple of years, or another, similarly minded person who wants to interact with others like you, this is a good conference to attend. It is heavily focused on brand building and generating revenue, and if that’s what interests you then you will find people who can help.

It wasn’t quite as useful to me, because although I run this blog as a business I’m not really looking to earn a profit. My revenue goals end at “don’t spend toooooo much of your own money.” I’ll show some numbers a little later so you can see how well that’s working out for me. But suffice it to say that I would’ve been a lot more successful at MIC if I’d understood that was the point and planned accordingly. My friends at the conference who are looking to build businesses seemed to get a lot more out of it than me. I’m keeping that in mind for next year!

MIC Pricing:

2018 MIC Ticket (VIP level): $265.98 (after tax) – this includes several meals and events that isn’t included in the basic level

2019 MIC Ticket (Basic level): $97.99 (before tax) – I will probably get the basic level next year, but TBD

Note that $97.99 price won’t last forever – they go up as the conference approaches. Actually, it doesn’t even appear to be available right now. When I go to buy tickets, it’s only offering the VIP as an option.

Tip: If you are traveling and expect to come back with a lot of stuff (swag, souvenirs, whatever) try to get free checked baggage on the flight. This means flying Southwest, or having a credit card that gives you free baggage, or using military baggage allowances (most airlines will allow military to check bags for free). If you expect to receive/buy a bag while you are traveling then use that to pack the extra stuff. If not, pack an extra bag in your luggage on the flight out. I like bags like this packable duffel for situations like this.

FYI, I am an Amazon Associate and if you click on that link and purchase anything from Amazon while using the link, I will earn a small referral. You pay no additional cost. The earnings go towards the cost of running this website. If you choose to use my link, thank you for your support! See my Disclosure for more details.

FinCon: September 25-29

After MIC, I rolled right into FinCon – the Financial Conference “Where Money and Media Meet.” This is the big conference every year for personal finance bloggers, and now podcasters, YouTubers, and a bunch of other personal finance types. Some people attend just because they like talking about money, and have no intention of being a blogger or other influencer.

Does that sound boring? It’s not!!

Yes, conferences can be really boring. This is not one of them. First off, even the official events are a lot of fun – imagine being 10 feet from some of your heroes and hearing them joke about, well, everything. Despite having over 2000 people this year, FinCon is actually a very casual event and you get to make real connections with people, both unknowns and big names. Jean Chatzky came within 3 inches of walking into me in the expo hall. There is an effort to get Suze Orman to attend next year…that’s a funny story if you want to talk about it sometime.

The early bird pricing for FinCon19 is already closed, but I’m sure I’ll talk about it again over the next year. If you are interested in attending, let me know! It’s going to be in Washington DC next year – perfect for me because I can visit with some of my friends who live there.

FinCon Pricing

2018 Fincon Ticket (Pro Pass): $290

2019 FinCon Ticket (Basic Pass): $210.63 – I realized that, like with MIC, I don’t “need” the Pro Pass for 2019 because I’m not trying to earn money from the blog. If you are trying to make money, Pro Pass might be worth the extra expense.

Tip: When you are attending events like conferences, think about your taxes. Since this blog is a business, everything I paid for (the ticket, travel, hotel, meals, etc) is a business expense. That means I can use it to lower my taxes. I do the same thing when I attend CampFI events. This is also why I don’t use points for the hotels or flights – points aren’t deductible on my taxes!

Speaking of CampFI, the 2019 events went on sale on October 1st. I’ll be attending the MidAtlantic (Virginia), Rocky Mountain (Colorado Springs), and Southwest (Joshua Tree, CA) events. If you are interested in attending too, I highly recommend buying a ticket soon as some of the events are already sold out. You can read my review from the 2018 CampFI MidAtlantic here.

Disney World: September 30-October 5

After Fincon18 ended, I headed over to Disney World. And I wasn’t alone – I went with Gwen from Fiery Millennials, Erik from The Mastermind Within, Erin from Reaching for FI, and Michelle from Frugality and Freedom (coming soon!).

Disney World is never a totally budget trip, but we managed to make it a little cheaper through a few tricks:

• When you go to Disney World, you choose between staying on property (expensive) and off property (need to pay for transportation). We decided to stay on property, but instead of staying in a Disney hotel (tiny rooms unless you pay $$$$) we stayed at the Best Western in Disney Springs. This is one of the non-Disney properties where they allow guests to enjoy the same privileges as Disney property guests. And yet, we were able to get a large room with 2 queen beds, a sofa bed, a fridge and microwave, and a balcony for a lower price than any Disney room.
• I used my military discounts to get us cheap tickets and discounts at a couple of restaurants.
• We split meals throughout the trip. Disney often serves very large meals, so it’s pretty easy for two adults to split an entrée and maybe a dessert. This is the five of us splitting four very large orders of poutine. It was a lot of food!

ChooseFI Podcast: October 1

I was on another podcast – ChooseFI! This was by far my biggest podcast appearance to date. I don’t know exactly what their stats are, but I think their audience is in the realm of several tens of thousands. That is a scary number of people listening to my voice.

Speaking of my voice, big time kudos to their editor. If you listen very, very carefully in the podcast, you can hear a section where the sound changes a little. What you don’t know is that recording was a bit of a boondoggle (sorry Brad and Jonathan!!). I was in the throes of my PCS this summer, so I had an empty house and a dog. Empty houses = lots of echoing space = bad for podcasting. Add to that the fact that my internet kept cutting out and my dog was getting antsy and I had to change locations multiple times, and it’s a miracle they were able to get anything out of the interview. So, seriously, stellar job with the editing!!

You can listen to my interview here.

Each Friday they publish a roundup episode with some commentary on the interview, comments from listeners, and some other stuff. You can find that episode here. Good comments by the other folks, right?? And hey, I’m forever tied to the Playing with FIRE documentary!!

Playing with FIRE

So let’s talk for a moment about that documentary!

You can find out more about the documentary, as well as sign up for the newsletter, by visiting their website. But I don’t like blindly visiting links without some indication of what I’ll find, so I’m going to assume you don’t either. Here’s what it’s about:

• The documentary is about a year in the life of a family as they learn about FIRE (financial independence/retire early)
• The doc will premiere in January 2019 – you can see the trailer at the Playing with FIRE website
• They just wrapped up their Kickstarter campaign. Over 1000 of us FIREes donated to the campaign, raising more than 250% of the goal! The average donation was $93.55, which should tell you something about our passion for this project.
• Prefer books? That’s coming too. You can preorder via the website

FWIW, I’m not in any way associated with this film nor do I benefit from it…except from the continued spreading of the message!

Now Let’s Talk About The Monetization Of This Site

You can see that I have a couple of ads on this site (scroll up or down if they aren’t immediately visible). I try to keep them very limited, but they are there. I get paid a very (very!) small amount to have them on my site. And I get paid a little more if people actually click them, although I suspect that doesn’t happen very often. I also make a bit of money through the Amazon program that I mentioned above.

Altogether, this hasn’t amounted to much money. Since I started the blog in April 2017, my total earnings are:

• Ads: $178.69 (realized)
• Ads: $64.79 (unrealized)
• Amazon: $32.75 (unrealized)

Now, this basically covers the cost of…well…not much. All of that together doesn’t even cover what I paid up front for hosting this site. It hasn’t paid for the website theme, or the business cards, and it really, really hasn’t paid for the travel I’ve undertaken to CampFI, MIC, and FinCon! lol

But I have earned a lot of free travel via my credit card churning experiment referrals, which I never would have received if I didn’t start this website. So I feel like I’ve basically made “enough” back that I can start to look at doing something different with the money. That’s where you come in.

As you can see, the money I make on this blog isn’t much because I’m really limiting my monetization. But it’s not $0. As the blog grows, the amount I earn each month is going up little by little. And since that growth is directly due to your presence here on the blog, I’ve decided all of you should decide what I do with it!

The Options

I’m going to continue to use the Amazon revenue to pay for keeping this website running. And I’ll use the credit card points I receive from referrals to offset the travel I’m doing as a result of being a blogger.

But the ads…what should I do with the ads?

1. Get rid of them entirely. The revenue isn’t high enough to justify making readers look at them.
2. Keep the ads and donate the money to Fisher House. This is a 100/100, 4-star rated charity on Charity Navigator that provides lodging to military and veteran families while their loved ones are in the hospital. If this is the winning option, I’ll keep a visible running tally on how much the Military Dollar Community has donated!
3. Keep the ads and use the money to improve MilitaryDollar.com. I don’t have a firm plan here, but some things I’m thinking about are developing interactive content, growing the blog into other mediums (audio? video?), and purchasing swag that I can give out to all of you when I’m traveling.

It’s up to you! What should I do? The poll below will be open for one week, so vote now!