Military Dollar Turns Two!

Happy Birthday!!

To what? To this blog! It’s two today. Advanced for its age, I’d like to think.

That’s right, my blog is two whole years old today. It was “born” on April 15th, 2017, although I didn’t actually share it with anybody until April 19th. I wanted to make sure it was ready to go, you know?

The last time I did a post summarizing what has happened on this blog was my 100th post in September 2017. I thought for today I’d do something similar since most of my current readers showed up well after that. There aren’t going to be any financial insights directly in today’s post, but stick around. I’m going to share some of my favorite and most popular posts, as well as some things I’ve done outside this blog. I’d also like some feedback from you.

Also, can I just say that two years ago, I really didn’t think I’d be here today? I get easily distracted and did not expect that I’d maintain this for so long. In fact, I bought 5 years worth of hosting services up front to trick my brain into feeling beholden (I hate wasting money, sunk cost fallacy be damned). Turns out I love it. Who knew?

Tell Me About Yourself

I’ll start with my questions for you, because my plan is to use this information to make the blog better. The rest of the post may or may not be interesting to you, depending on how long you’ve been following me and what you care about. But while reviewing the content of this blog, I’ve come up with some questions that I’d like you to answer. Getting your input will help me shape and improve this blog, long may it live.

So if you don’t mind, please fill out this series of questions. It’s kind of long but you can answer some questions and not others, that’s fine. Then we’ll get into my two year review.

If you have anything else you’d like to add, please write a comment at the end of the post!

Thanks for that! Now that I’ve learned more about you, it’s time for you to take a peek behind the curtains of this blog.

Most Popular Posts

Popularity of these posts is judged by total number of page views over the last two years.

My most read post of all time

Off Duty Employment for Military Members with 21,737 views. The reason this one is so popular is that there is extremely limited information about this topic online, and lots of people looking for this information. Here’s a note to all of the military leaders reading this: share this information with your troops! People obviously care about this topic if 1 in 11 people reading my blog came here for this post. Help your folks out by helping them improve their financial situation responsibly.

My most read post that isn’t military-specific

REI Garage Sale Tips and Tricks with 18,851 views. This one surprised me – I didn’t have any expectation of ranking highly on Google when I wrote this. If you like outdoor activities, read this one!

My most popular series

Retiring on a Military Pension Case Studies series with a combined 42,487 views. This is obviously something people are thinking about, even if they’ve never heard of FIRE (financial independence/retire early). When people are approaching the end of their military career, the thought of not having to work again is probably top of mind. Surprisingly, the one about an enlisted member with a family and how he plans to make this work isn’t very popular. I urge you to talk to your enlisted friends and coworkers – this is doable if they want it, but they have to be thinking about it now.

My most popular post with a visualization or printable

How I Visualize My Money with 3176 views. I’ve created a number of posts that show you how to build or download products for yourself to help with your financial planning. This one shows three different ways I track my money: how close I am to financial independence, how much square footage I own of my rental property, and how I spend my money. I might have to redo this post here soon – lots of things have changed since I published it in 2017!

My Favorite Posts

While I’d love to say that every single post I write is worthy of a Pulitzer, we both know that’s not true. Some posts aren’t great, others are fine but nothing special. But some…some I really enjoy creating. And those are the ones that tend to resonate with you, too. So I want to share a few of my personal favorite posts with you.

Favorite post that thinks outside the box

I follow so much personal finance content, you guys. So much. And what I’ve found is that a lot of personal finance followers, especially in Facebook groups and Reddit, tend to think of their retirement planning as one thing. It’s 401(k) investing, or a pension, or real estate, or Social Security. It’s very focused, and focused can be good. But I don’t think it’s ideal when talking about retirement planning.

I don’t really see a lot of people talking about how they are doing multiple things to build up their retirement portfolio. It’s a lot of “should I do A or B?” Um…both if you can! And if you can’t swing both right now, maybe do one this year and another the next. Diversity is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s why I like this post about my Retirement Platform. It goes through all the different things I’m doing to diversify my retirement planning, and describes how each one supports my plan. Do you have a retirement platform?

Favorite post that tells you not to limit yourself to a self-prescribed box

I really don’t like it when people try to make hard and fast rules about personal finance. The word “personal” is right there! So my post Doctrine, Dogma, and Personal Finance pushed back on some of the way-too-trendy things I’ve seen in personal finance circles. We aren’t all the same so we shouldn’t all be doing the same things. Ugh. That’s so boring!

Favorite post that reassures people they are normal

People who love their job are lucky. I consider myself one of them. But not everybody is lucky in their employment. Some people don’t get to work in their dream job and that’s 100% okay. That’s why I wrote The Problem With “Choose A Job You Love And You Will Never Work A Day In Your Life”.

I don’t like financial “advice” that tells people to just find their dream job and then they don’t have to worry about saving money for retirement. That’s crappy advice, in my opinion. I’d much rather tell people to set up a strong financial life while also doing what they can to find a job they enjoy, or at least one that doesn’t make them miserable. But pretending the only good option is “finding a job they love” is just setting people up, I think. This post is my response to that advice.

Favorite post I like to refer people to when they complain about military pay

Easy. A Civilian’s Guide To Understanding Military Pay And Allowances. If you know me, you know I don’t abide people just being flat out wrong without any evidence to back themselves up. And one of the things that people often say about the military is how poorly we are paid. This is flat out wrong without evidence to back it up.

Sure, sure, there are people in the military making less than they would doing a similar job in the civilian world. There are also people in the military making more than they would doing a similar job in the civilian world. Those are objective facts. It’s also an objective fact that there are jobs in the military that don’t even exist in the civilian world!

But military people getting paid a low income isn’t supported by the numbers. We make enough to lead middle class lives. That’s not “poorly paid.” That’s like someone saying a veterinarian making $120,000/year is “low income” just because it’s much less than an anesthesiologist would make.

Anyway, I like this post because it clearly lays out how much military members are actually paid without any rhetoric. Just the facts, ma’am. I also like it because it’s a pretty popular post, which (hopefully) means civilians are actually finding it on the internet and using it for research. I hope this post encourages people looking at a military career to pursue it without fears of low pay.

The Page That Sums Up The Purpose Of The Blog

If you are anything like I was before I started blogging, you don’t know the difference between blog posts and blog pages. They pretty much look the same.

Well, it turns out they are different. A blog post is a single article you read, generally about a single topic. On a food blog, it might be a recipe for Chicken Paprikash. On a travel blog, it might be a review of a particular hotel. Here on Military Dollar, what you are reading right now is a blog post.

A page is different. It’s more static, and a good place to gather multiple bits of information in one place.

My favorite page on my blog is The Ever Growing Guide To Military Money. This page is where I link every single post I write that relates to military personal finance topics. It’s like a table of contents for the military-specific topics on my site, and is where I’d direct any military reader to start on my blog. If I had to point to one thing to say “that sums up why I started the blog” it’d be this page.

Guest Appearances

While obviously the majority of my effort is here on Military Dollar, I do occasionally appear elsewhere. Here are links to all of those appearances.

November 13, 2017 blog post on Millennial Money Man: Can Serving in the Military Make Reaching FIRE Easier?

December 26, 2017 podcast interview on FIRE Drill Podcast: Military Savings Strategies You’ve Never Heard Of

January 29, 2018 blog post on Military.com: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Military Money (this was later included in the Stars and Stripes 2019 Financial Planning Guide)

May 28 and 31, 2018 podcast interview on Chain of Wealth: Episode 70a and Episode 70b

July 2, 2018 quotes in Money Magazine: Best Banks for Service Members and Veterans

October 1, 2018 podcast interview on ChooseFI: A Military Path To FI

April 15, 2019 podcast interview on Bellas ad Bellum: Retirement Planning with Airmen Mildollar (and watch for another episode next week! Sorry my sound sucked…oof)

THE BLOG REPORT

I did this for my 100th post so I’m going to do it again here. This is really for my fellow bloggers who are total voyeurs, not so much the people reading for personal finance content. If you aren’t interested, feel free to skip it and have a good day! I’ll see you again soon with a new post.

Everything is as of late on April 14th and will have changed a smidge by the time I post this.

Blog Stats

Blog Posts Published: 216, counting this one. That’s an average of one every 3.4 days.

Words Published On The Blog: 308,596, not counting this one (this one is shaping up to be about 2100 words). That’s more words than in the book A Game of Thrones. That’s an average of 1435 words per post. That number is skewed low because I used to write a weekly summary post that was typically 300-400 words. These days my posts are more like 1600-1800 words on average.

Longest Blog Post: 4270 words in Career Expectations vs Reality: 9 Friends Explain Why They Left The Military

Shortest Blog Post: 124 words in Bonus Post – BRS Comparison Calculator

Comments: 653 from others and 541 responses from me (1194 total)

Spam Comments Blocked By Software: 40,585

Malicious Log In Attempts: 10,988

Social Media Stats

Facebook Likes / Follows: 774 / 682 (find me here)

Twitter Followers: 3382 (find me here)

Pinterest Followers: I stopped doing anything with Pinterest in late 2017. I love Pinterest as a user but hate it as a content producer!

Viewership Stats

Total Views: about 249,000

Visitors: about 154,000

Most Frequent Commenter: Angela from Tread Lightly Retire Early

Most Popular Day For Readers To Visit The Blog: Saturday

How I Get Traffic: Mostly organic search, but my #1 referrer is Facebook

Country With The Most Views: The United States. This should come as a surprise to literally nobody.

Country With The Most Views That Isn’t The US: Germany, probably because we have a lot of military members there. Rounding out the top five are Canada, the UK, Japan, and South Korea.

Weirdest Country With Views: I’m going with Faroe Islands because I’d never heard of it before seeing that I have three views from there!

Total Number Of Countries I’ve Had Visitors From: It depends on what you count as a country, but WordPress has me at 179 countries!!

Countries I Haven’t Had Visitors From (yet): Svalbard, Nicaragua, Haiti, French Guiana, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Togo, Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Yemen, Iran, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kosovo, Bhutan, North Korea.

Thanks for joining me on this retrospective of the blog. Here’s to two more years!