What's Old Is New — See Me Get Rich Is Back!
Some years ago, over thirteen years ago in 2007, to be exact, I began a humble personal finance blog called “See Me Get Rich” to document my foray into personal finance and long-term investing. See Me Get Rich developed quite a readership, at its peak reaching over 500 unique visitors a day. Then, as it often does, life happened and I let See Me Get Rich languish in the blogosphere while I pursued other interests, both career and personal. But, what’s old is new, and I am resurrecting See Me Get Rich as branch of my personal website alongside my other professional, personal, and writing projects that you can find on my website’s homepage.
The first iteration of See Me Get Rich was inspiring to me but also amateurish in many ways as well. Some of my earlier posts are mind-bogglingly inwardly focused, despite my attempt to help readers overcome their own psychological and practical barriers to getting started investing. Some of my own financial moves were misinformed, such as my foray into buying individual stocks without taking the time to truly understand the financial ins and outs of the stocks I was buying. And yet, readers found See Me Get Rich inspiring, as it was inspiring for me to share my insights, my discoveries, and my own financial ups and down with the world at large.
Blogging itself has made something of a comeback in recent years, after an initial peak in the mid-2000s and a subsequent dip in the relevance and popularity of blogs. We live in a different era now than when See Me Get Rich first started. Mobile devices are now ubiquitous, blogs look and function quite differently than they did thirteen years ago, search engine optimization is a completely different ballgame now than it was back then, and, most relevantly, we are once again in a global financial crisis because of the recent COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, just as we faced a global financial crisis in 2008. With the resulting market downturn, it seemed to me that the time was right to turn my attention again toward personal finance, investing, and sound personal finance decisions, even as I pursue other professional and authoring interests such as my philosophy blog, Meta Meditations, also found on my personal website.
Much has happened to me personally and professionally as well in the last thirteen years. I am on the tail end of a lengthy divorce. I have relocated from my hometown of Vacaville, California to Idaho Falls, Idaho. I now host two podcasts (Meta Treks and To The Journey) on the Trek.fm podcast network, one of which won a Parsec Award in 2018 for best speculative fiction fan or news podcast. And I’m immensely proud of the instructional design work I’ve done over the last four years, both in its creativity and in the way it had helped to broaden by skillset. It’s not all roses and sunshine, however, as I recently found out that the instructional designer position I’ve had for the last four years is being eliminated, so I am once again on the job market, having faced a similar career hiccup only four years before when my position with Cengage Learning / Aplia was eliminated. I have weathered stock market ups and down, credit card balance fluctuations, 401(k) withdraws to pay off said credit card debt. And I have weathered a host of other financial, personal, and professional peaks and valleys that I will get into in future posts.
Despite it all, I have clawed my way out of the depths, and I have thrived even when the obstacles before me seemed unsurmountable. There is still room for improvement in my own financial picture, as there probably is in yours as well. And that’s a journey that I’m looking forward to taking together with you, readers of See Me Get Rich both new and returning. We will talk about all things investing and personal finance, yes, but we will also talk about what it takes to live a rich and happy life, financial and otherwise. On that note, I will wrap up this first post of See Me Get Rich, version 2, and I look forward to the next phase of the journey.
