10 Reasons Why We Blog

Welcome to this post about 10 Reasons Why We Blog!

I’ve had this idea for awhile now. For some reason, I feel the need to write this post to explain to others why we blog but also to remind ourselves of why we are doing this.

I guess the goal would be to share this post with other people whenever we’re telling someone about the blog for the first time. It should be a good overview of what we’re doing here at Teen Financial Freedom.

I also think it would be valuable to remind ourselves of these reasons if and when we ever wanted to quit blogging. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that right now, but we might as well be prepared for when that moment comes.

So without further ado, here are 10 Reasons Why We Blog!

1. Impact Others

By far the most important reason we blog is to impact others.

After all, our mission statement at TFF is:

“Teen Financial Freedom is a personal finance blog run by teens who are on a mission to equip their peers with the knowledge, resources, and understanding they need to become financially free for the rest of their lives.”

Yesterday we recorded a podcast episode with Chase Guelette from The Top Youth Business Podcast. Something he said really stuck out to me and was incredibly mature for someone just 16 years old.

He said, “My biggest fear in life is making it to 70 years old and realizing that I never impacted anyone and I never did anything important.”

While I had never consciously thought of that before, I think it’s always been in the back of my mind as well. My mission statement in life is, “To help others pursue the full development of their potential”. Quite honestly, I think that should be one of everyone’s main purposes in life. Everyone should be striving to impact others in some way, shape, or form.

2. Solve Financial Literacy

Overall, I believe there is a massive lack of financial literacy among teens. Most teens know hardly anything about personal finance…and we can’t blame them.

Personal finance is rarely taught in school so teens are left to their own devices to learn about this critical subject. Unless they are lucky enough to have their parents teach them about it, they likely won’t learn until they are thrown in at the deep end in adulthood.

I’ve heard from so many adults that they just wish they knew the things that I know at my age. Most adults don’t start learning about money until 25-30 years old. By then, they have already accumulated thousands of dollars of student loan debt and have missed out on years of compound interest that could have been working for them.

Our goal is to educate before teens they find themselves in a predicament they struggle to get out of. Or in other words, to help them prevent mistakes that they may regret later on.

3. Make Money

Now, we would be lying if we said we weren’t doing this to make money. After all, the main reason why I started this blog was because I was researching ways to make money online.

We’re almost 2 years into blogging and we’ve made hardly any money. Now this year we’re looking to change that, but it hasn’t always been our main focus.

If make money was our #1 reason for why we blog, we would have quit so long ago. However, since we are more interested in impacting others and solving financial literacy, we’re still blogging to this day.

Long term, we do plan to reap the rewards for all of our hard work on this blog. But so far, that hasn’t happened.

4. Have No Regrets

Another reason why I started the blog was to have no regrets. That has always been one of my family’s mottos and one that I took to heart back in July of 2019.

I had always considered starting a blog but never got around to it. My dad had started one before and I absolutely loved how inspirational his blog posts were.

For the longest time I think I was held back by the fact that I didn’t know what I would write about. But, as I continued to develop my passion for business and finance, it became pretty clear.

Going back to reason #1, if I wouldn’t have given blogging a try, I probably would have regretted that in the future. I would constantly look back and wonder, what would my life be like if I would have started that blog when I was 16?

Thankfully, I won’t have to worry about that now. The only thing I would have to regret would be if I decided to quit blogging before I saw it come to fruition.

5. Personal Reflection

This is one that we have touched on before, but a big reason why we blog is for personal reflection.

I quite frequently say that when I write these posts, I’m writing to myself. I’m writing the things that I need to hear and if it happens to be beneficial to others, great.

Terry said it well in our podcast recording yesterday, “We often write about the problems we have experienced in our lives and the solutions we have come up with to fix them”.

I also heard someone once say that your greatest weakness as a child turns into your greatest strength as an adult. So as we’re reflecting on the issues we currently deal with, we’re setting ourselves up to be experts on the solutions in the future!

6. Educate Ourselves

Another massive benefit we get from writing posts here is that we learn a lot about the topic we are writing about.

For example, I recently wrote a post called, A Better Alternative to Dollar Cost Averaging, which happened to perform really well.

But anyways, I was genuinely curious about this topic. I had long wondered if there was a better alternative to dollar cost averaging that had to do with buying more when the markets dropped. I started out by trying to create a new investment strategy but couldn’t really find anything that did what I wanted it to.

So, I did some research and actually stumbled upon the strategy I was looking for called value averaging. I had never heard of that strategy before I wrote that post, but now I believe it’s the best investment strategy out there for long term investing.

So the lesson here is that sometimes we learn more by writing posts than we would ever learn by reading other people’s posts.

7. Self Improvement

The next few reasons have to do with self improvement, but I still believe this deserves it’s own category. Just as in the last point we were talking about how we educate ourselves by writing posts, the entire blogging process is about self improvement.

Everything that we write about we try to apply to our own lives. We were saying earlier that we write to ourselves in these posts, and that’s especially true when it comes to topics related to self improvement.

Side note here, I’ve been feeling the need recently to explain why we publish self improvement content on a personal finance blog. I don’t think anyone is mad about it, but maybe there have been a few people that are curious.

One of our team members, Dani, writes primarily self improvement content as she’s not too familiar with business and finance just yet. I myself have been writing more and more about self improvement recently because it’s a topic that really interests me.

So, when you couple those two together, it seems like a majority of our content has been based on self improvement. Aside from the fact that there’s really only that much you can talk about without repeating yourself when it comes to personal finance for teens, we’ve been writing about self improvement for a few reasons.

Financial freedom is like a sub-goal of self improvement. If you’re into self improvement, one of the areas you should focus on is your finances.

This is because financial freedom and self improvement go hand and hand. Financial freedom is a lifestyle that needs discipline, motivation, and systems to reach your goals. A lot of those skills and techniques can be gained from self improvement.

8. Productivity

I’ve also mentioned this before but one of the reasons why we blog is to be productive.

On our podcast yesterday we were talking about how the bar is set pretty low for teens when it comes to productivity. It seems as if adults are okay with you just getting by in school without focusing on anything else.

Once you’re done with school, you’re free to do whatever you want whether that means video games, Netflix, YouTube, or social media.

I can attest to the fact that it’s easy to have days where you do nothing but lay in bed all day on your phone. But, when I have days like this I feel terrible about how I spent my time.

The reality is that time is limited and we shouldn’t waste it. Yes, some recharging is necessary. But, you don’t need to be recharging all of the time.

I prefer to be productive about 75% of the time and I feel much better if I am. I’m currently writing this post at 9:00pm because I had a very lazy morning and didn’t do anything productive until the late afternoon. I was going to procrastinate writing this post until tomorrow, but decided that I didn’t want to spend the entire day being lazy.

That’s what I like about blogging. Even if nothing else comes from it, it keeps me productive and makes me feel better about how I spend my time.

9. Improve Writing Skills

One obvious benefit to writing blog posts is that our writing skills have improved. If you go read some of my oldest posts compared to this now, there’s a big difference.

I will say that I still don’t think I’m a great writer. Even though I think I’m only mediocre for someone my age, I think I’m a lot better now than I would have been if I wouldn’t have started this blog.

I still struggle with grammatical errors, finding my style, and even spelling sometimes! But, I’m getting better with each post that I write which is something that I try to remind myself.

In addition to writing skills, I blogging has improved a lot of other skills as well. Communication, teamwork, leadership, and technical skills are a few that come to mind.

Side note, I actually make websites for a people as a freelancer because of my experience designing this website. I’m always trying to remind our team that although the skills we have learned from this might not have paid off yet, they will someday!

10. Grow Our Network

Last but certainly not least, one reason we blog is to grow our network. If I wouldn’t have started this blog, I would have never met Joshua, Terry, Amanda, or Dani.

I also would have never met Caleb Guilliams, Mariah Wood, or anyone else from the BetterWealth team. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to interview Chase Guelette yesterday on the podcast or have plans to interview so many other cool people in the future.

That’s actually one of the main reasons we started the podcast. Terry and I want to interview some of the biggest names in the personal finance niche. We’re talking about Graham Stephan, Dave Ramsey, and Robert Kiyosaki.

Who knows where these connections will lead us in the future, but if nothing else we can at least get to sit down and ask each of them some questions.

The Takeaway

That’s it, those are the 10 Reasons Why We Blog! If you need a quick recap:

1. Impact Others
2. Solve Financial Literacy
3. Make Money
4. Have No Regrets
5. Personal Reflection
6. Educate Ourselves
7. Self Improvement
8. Productivity
9. Improve Writing Skills
10. Grow Network

I hope you enjoyed this post and found something either informative or inspirational. Please drop any comments, questions, or concerns down below! Best of luck on your own blog or just with life in general!