First Month Writing on TicTocLife Blog Report

With one month under our belts writing about FIRE, what’ve we thought about the experience so far? We’ve also shared TicTocLife’s blog stats!

Just like that, our first month of writing on TicTocLife has passed! There’s a lot going on in the world, Jenni and I let it slip by so this is coming to you a day late.

So, what’s been going on?

We’ve both made changes to our work situation in the past month, moving closer to a form of early retirement. That’s detailed below. We’ve also asked each other about our thoughts so far doing our “public documenting” that constitutes TicTocLife.

Certainly, neither of us expected to have many people reading our ranting and raving. We greatly appreciate the many comments, tweets, features on other sites, and general welcoming from the community! For the stats nerds, check out the TicTocLife blog breakdown below.

Where do things stand since our inaugural welcome message and subsequent early retirement plan post?

The jump to part-time

Jenni’s plan to make the transition to part-time work from her (now previous!) salaried, full-time position has gone well. She turned over lots of responsibility and as of writing is on her fourth day off in a row.

She’ll work the last two days of the week, and perhaps a bit remotely tomorrow, for somewhere around 16-20 hours in total for the week. She’s hoping that’s fairly consistent in the immediate future while the team is still handling COVID-19 and its impact on the pharmacy she works for.

Letting off the business gas pedal

Meanwhile, I’ve been working to lower expectations in the consulting work that I do with my clients. While this has been going on for years, it’s naturally occurring more and more as I limit any new projects for me to handle personally. I’ve whittled things down to meaningful, particularly fulfilling or satisfying projects.

I’m expecting to turn in about eight hours of special project work per week for the immediate future. I’ll attempt to keep pace with Jenni’s changes.

What do we think about the first month?

Jenni and I have done a little Q&A with each other about our thoughts about our first month writing in our semi-anonymous way here on TicTocLife so far.

Q: Jenni, what do you think about writing on TicTocLife about your experience jumping to part-time so far?

Jenni: My experience writing has been fun!  I am excited to create something with Chris that helps me focus my attention on what I need to do next in FI but also to be able to share my stories and struggles with others like me.  Even though I have only published a few blogs, there are a lot more in draft form waiting to be completed.

Each new topic creates many new ideas that I want to share.  Once I get through all of the more urgent and timely topics, I will share some of the fun adventures of the past and what will come next with our financial independence life.

Q: Chris, which blog post did you have the most fun creating and why?

Chris: I think I had the most fun with the Frugal v. Cheap post. I took the opportunity to write with a little more flowery prose. It’s enjoyable to read, and was creatively interesting to write—I think! I wrote it as more of a story and used a wobbly desk as a character to discuss the merits of frugality and cheapness.

TicTocLife statistics

While our May monthly budget offered a little financial voyeurism, we thought you might find the TicTocLife-related statistics entertaining or enlightening as well. Call it a little website statistical voyeurism.

We’re definitely still getting the hang of social media and handling this website presence generally. More than anything, we’re grateful anyone has found this site helpful. We thought we’d be writing into the void for a while!

These stats are for the period of May 8, 2020 to June 8, 2020.

TotalsCount
Views1,829
Visitors929
Followers28
Comments22
Posts13
Words21,892
Unpublished Drafts22
Countries visiting38
Ads0

Most Popular Posts:

Community

We count followers via social media channels and email subscribers. We’re generally most active on Twitter.

If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, be sure to follow/like/subscribe wherever you prefer to keep in touch:

I think what we’re most pleased about is the comments. Even though roughly half are our replies to comments, they are indicative of discussion around the topics that the posts represent. Please, if you want to participate, have questions, or just want to say hello—don’t hesitate!

As we’re both attempting to be semi-anonymous with our writing here, we haven’t had friends or family to rely on to help keep the conversation going.

We’re so happy it’s such a welcoming community to interact with.

Where are you from?

It’s really neat to see a whopping 38 countries, visitors around the world, coming to say hello and read what we’re writing. Hello!

Almost all of the traffic coming is from some form of referral. The largest is Google’s Discovery system on mobile devices with most of that traffic going to one post. The rest of our visitors are being referred from forums, other blogs, or specifically a feature in a newsletter on Personal Finance Blogs (thanks!).

Unfortunately, the world’s search engines haven’t quite caught wind of our writing yet, so there’s nearly zero organic search traffic. One day, that’ll probably change.

Up and to the right!

Jenni and I started TicTocLife as just a way for us to document our jump to part-time work and transition into early retirement. We figured that some other folks might find our experiences useful and so we decided to make them public. Our intention isn’t beyond that, hence no ads.

We’ve got a lot more to write, as evidenced by having more drafts than published posts even a month in! Stay tuned.

If this post seems to generate some interest, we’ll try to do another update around the three month mark.

We do hope you get value out of what we bring to your screens, so let us know where we can do better and what you like!

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By Chris

Chris began his financial independence pursuit in 2007 as he learned basic personal finance from Get Rich Slowly as an aspiring web designer and novice investor. After several missteps, he learned the secrets of financial independence and began his pursuit of freedom.

He reached financial independence in 2018 with $1.2M and two businesses. He began the process of transitioning to early retirement in 2020.

Learn more: Meet Chris.

2 replies on “First Month Writing on TicTocLife Blog Report”

Cool, thanks for sharing your stats.

I would love to read more posts about your thoughts on early retirement and how you are experiencing it so far (even though you are still working part time). It’s pretty neat reading what you think in “real time”.

P.S – I’m pretty sure if you have a visitor from Malta, it’s me ?

Cheers,
BF

Thanks for those Malta views! 😉
 
That’s a good idea! Behind the scenes, Jenni and I have been trying to sort out all sorts of stuff related to scheduling, social activities, and catching up on all the “stuff” we’ve let linger with a fuller schedule.
 
A part of that planning has been coming up with a clearer schedule and writing topics for this blog, so, indeed expect more! We’ll certainly take that advice into account and include a bit more of the “reality show” that is our switch to part-time and moving into a type of early retirement.
 
Cheers!

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