Greetings! I am Sustainable PF and together with my wonderful wife Mrs. SPF we write at Sustainable Personal Finance where we discuss balancing our financial goals with our lifestyle and beliefs regarding sustainable living in Ontario, Canada. Mrs. SPF and I were married just under a year and a half ago. We had a number of goals we wanted to accomplish which included importing a car from the United States, fixing up and selling the house I bought prior to meeting Mrs. SPF, finding a home together and buying it, and last but not least, get our finances in order. In retrospect we should have dealt with our finances first.
So I started reading, and reading, and reading. I only read one book which was a good start but to my pleasant surprise there was an abundance of material online written by personal finance bloggers! I couldn’t get enough information via blogs and I quickly found that one blog would lead to another. I was hooked and learning a ton.
Late last summer I bounced the idea of writing off of Mrs. SPF. She knows me well enough that I need to keep myself busy, but she didn’t know I was going to keep us both busy! Mrs. SPF suggested we get settled in our new home before embarking on new projects and I agreed.
I had an idea on what we could write about – a topic both of us are interested in but one that is not very well covered in the PF blogging world: sustainability/green/eco/socially responsible personal finance. Some fellow Yakezie members were discussing this topic but I felt we could add a spin where I would discuss how participating in sustainable living could make sense from a financial perspective and i’d prove it using numbers and data. Our eco-energy retrofit return on investment spurred the desire to explore this topic further. I did say both of us. I needed to get Mrs. SPF on board as she is much more versed in green and eco than I am.
So once again I proposed the idea of writing a blog to Mrs. SPF and she was supportive that I wanted to test my hand at writing. Thing was, she didn’t know I wanted us to work on this together! Mrs. SPF was skeptical but I convinced her that this would be a great project that we could both work on, and, that i’d handle the technical aspect – all she would need to do would be write an article every few weeks and to respond to comments on her articles. She agreed.
I’d done my research. I lined up purchasing our domain name and got our hosting figured out. I started work on our original design and wrote our vehicle import series. I learned about the Yakezie challenge and joined the public forums and officially joined the challenge on Nov 20th with an Alexa rating of over 23 million and 8 short weeks later we got our ranking below 200,000.
So that folks, in a nutshell, is how we got started blogging. We’ve been having a great time and have made some great friends through the Yakezie network. We look forward to continuing to grow our blog and our readership.
I have had the pleasure of working with you before, but it is good to hear your back story. Your Alexa leap is so impressive! I hope Mrs. SPF is enjoying blogging as much as you are. (Sounds like she is.)
Thanks Melissa!
Mrs. SPF enjoys the writing a lot, which is precisely what we wanted to do together. She leaves me to network and find great articles on all of your sites for our weekend reading, then she catches up with the superb content created by this network and others as well!
Great intro Mr & Mrs SPF. It has been great interacting with you thus far, and I’m looking forward to continue doing so in the future! Keep up your 365 tips series – I enjoy it.
Hi Jeff,
We found your site pretty darn quick when we started looking into PF. While you also focus on the lifestyle your site gave us a lot of ideas on how to approach where we wanted to go. Thank you for your friendship and support as we started on this fantastic journey.
I really enjoy your tips. You found a great niche. You are a great addition to the network.
Thanks Barb! I haven’t really found another site that does exactly what we do (equate specific financial analysis to green/sustainable lifestyle with PF) which is a good thing! I think part of our success is the lack of direct competition in a PF realm where there are so many fantastic particpants.
Your 365 sustainability tips are very unique, Jeff (&Mrs. SPF)! Keep up the good work and congratulations!
@moneycone – not sure I follow, but i’m not Jeff! He is Sustainable Life Blog where we are Sustainable Personal Finance ;) Thanks for the support though!
:) I knew this day would come! I have both yours and Jeff’s RSS feeds next to each other and always keep getting mixed up!
This is really funny. I wondered myself who is Jeff in reference to Mr SPF. LOL
I was more worried about who is Jeff in reference to MRS SPF hehe
Great to have you on board with us SPF!
Thanks! Enjoying it thoroughly!
[…] Sustainable PF – via Yakezie Network! Their story on how they started blogging, what inspired them and how they do it. Also, congrats on the reaching a ranking below 200,000! […]
Sounds like u two are off to a great start! I like the Yakezie network and plan on joining myself, seems like a great social connection to other personal finance blogs, and one central area to learn a lot of new things! Im curious to how the technical aspect is coming along for you, thats been my most difficult part of starting my blog, im a finance guy! Come check mine out, I try and take my personal finance advice from personal experiences, products ive tried, investment vehicles I use, etc
Hi MoneyIsTheRoot,
I was trained as a programmer although I was only in that profession about 2.5 years before moving to more senior level IT work. I don’t find using WordPress too daunting and when I need to change a .php file I can usually figure out how to do so on my own, and when I can’t figure it out on my own I turn to Google or the FANTASTIC Atahualpa help forums that are available to anyone who uses this great (and free!) customizable theme.
You’ve made great progress in such a short time and your story is inspiring. Along with everything you do on your blog, you and the missus are big contributors to the Yakezie community. Keep up the good work!
Elbow grease really. I tend to dig into something and hang on like a tick to a dog. Being a bit obsessive has helped, believe it or not. I need to keep busy so a hobby like blogging makes all the work involved pretty normal.
I always enjoy reading your posts. I have no idea how you manage to write 10 posts a week! It is quite impressive. Great story about your start. I am always interested to find out how people come to be bloggers. Congratulations! You are doing an amazing job!
Some of our posts are pretty short. I actually spend more time on SEO and picture selection than they take to write! We do take advantage of guest posts too :)
I love sustainability, especially when it can save you money. So many people fight eco-friendly because in the beginning, it was much more expensive. But I try to make them see that they can save money with the side benefit of helping the environment! Great niche.
Thanks FC!
We also like to think of green/sustainability as an investment. E.G. it costs a bunch to insulate your home but the heating/cooling savings will pay for itself and more over time.
Congratulation team SPF!!! You guys are doing so well, I can’t help being envious. :D
Great job on recruiting Mrs. SPF to write for the blog. I got Mrs. RB40 to help edit, but that’s about all I could convince her to do. She is already way too busy with all her activities.
Something is better than nothing! I should get Mrs. SPF to edit my work sometimes. It is embarrassing when a post goes out on RSS with typos.
Thanks for sharing your story, SPF. You’ve made quick work of the Alexa rankings, great job. Glad to have you on board!
Ooh, my bad. I did the the same thing as moneycone. I thought your blog was the same as sustainablelifeblog. I just added your RSS feed to my reader because your styles are way different even though you are in the same genre. After PF blogs, my next most favorite category is simple living blogs. Thank you for bringing my two favorite subjects together.
I really like how you quantify your sustainability topics. It really helps knowing how much energy, etc is saved.
Jeff and I get along really well and we’ve done some guest post exchanges. But I agree – our styles are very different even though we overlap on our niches a little bit.
congrats on meeting your goal so quickly. something about your brand makes it feel like you have authority and have been around for a while — serves you well!
Thanks dealerity. That is quite a compliment. We try to add fluff to our posts and we make sure we research a lot and crunch the numbers to back up our points.
Nice to learn more about Team SPF! Great passion for your niche and it shows. Forgot to mention, love your new logo. Who designed it? Continued success and ride your amazing momentum!
We have an even newer logo since you made this post! I should see about getting our member post edited to reflect our new look.
It was great to hear your background. I love following your tips when I can!
Hello, SPF (nice name/abbreviation, by the way). Your story of how you got into personal finance blogs sounded awfully familiar to me; we should be required to put warnings up about how addictive these blogs can be. It sounds like you have a very interesting niche; being green minded, I’ll have to read more of what you have to share.
Hi Roger – we would be happy to discuss things “green” with you at our site. Please feel free to add your comments and thoughts any time, all the time! :)
It’s great that the both of you blog together! I wish I could get my wife to write on my blog, she is a better writer than I am :)
I didn’t know php when I started so it was a little odd looking at first, but I’m getting there…
I still don’t know much. We use the Atahualpa theme and the help forums they have are pretty awesome. I have yet to run into a problem that hasn’t been encountered by another user of this theme and if it hasn’t the gurus on that forum are really helpful. I love being able to customize our look.
Glad to have you here. Look forward to getting to know you guys better!
You too Dr. Dean. Thanks for commenting at our site, we do appreciate it!
takes two to tango the want it’s meant to ;) congratulations on getting your spouse’s buy-in and more so their support. you are very lucky, as we can see from the comments how many (including myself) are envious of your situation. good to read about it and all the best to you both!
I’m a lucky man!
Nice to learn more about you. Congratulations and welcome to the Yakezie!!
I wonder if Mrs. SPF knew what she was getting into! You are one of a few husband/wife blogging teams. Any hiccups so far?
The only hiccup has been my nit picking about punctuation and capitalization!
I’m just happy Mrs. SPF is still on board. She did try to start up a 6 part series about our sustainable wedding but it didn’t get many reads or comments so she lost some motivation and ultimately didn’t finish the series. It’s too bad as we though it was a good topic.
Congrats on hitting the challenge so successfully, SPF! That’s cool that you got Mrs. SPF on board too, and that the site is a team effort.
I think it’s so great that you guys write together! Especially because you publish so many posts!
If Mrs. SPF didn’t write almost all of the Sustainability Tips there is no way I could keep up writing the longer articles and the tips together. Much too much work.
I think it’s great that you work on the blog together. My husband has no interest! Thanks for all the great tips so far and I’m looking forward to working with you in the Yakezie.
I write by myself, I think. I sometimes wonder, since I argue with myself! I look forward to stopping by.
We appreciate you coming by and commenting on our articles krantcents. Means a lot to us.
I have read SPF’s blog many times. Good tips. I like the new logo by the way.
Thanks Squirrelers!
Wow, great teamwork! It’s really fun working (and writing) with your spouse. I bet you guys are both enjoying writing your blogs everyday.
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