Yakezie Member Post – Len Penzo dot Com

What an honor to be part of this great group of bloggers!

I suspect I am probably one of the older bloggers in the Yakezie.   I am 46-years-old.   I have two great kids (13 and 11) and a terrific wife (she’s 42, but let’s keep that between you and me).

I was born and raised here in the Los Angeles area.

I am electrical engineer for a very large American corporation working in research and development on proprietary high-tech cutting-edge projects.   Despite the generous pay, the cyclical nature of my business has resulted in me always being very cautious about my finances.

In my 23-year career there have been five major layoff cycles.  So far I have been fortunate to avoid the axe, but you never know when your time is going to come – and so I remain vigilant, always being sure to live within my means and saving as much as I can for an early retirement.

Before I started blogging back in December 2008, I was never much of a blog reader.

I’m sure that was mainly because I was an old-school guy who read the newspaper instead.   Oh yes.

My dad got me hooked reading the newspaper when I was eight years old.   At first I only read the Sports section — usually checking up on how my Los Angeles Dodgers did the night before — but eventually I found myself reading interesting articles and stories throughout every section of the newspaper.

It’s a habit I kept with me until very recently.

THE SHIFT

Up until a couple years ago, I really enjoyed sitting down with a nice hot cup of coffee (one sugar, and a bit of half-and-half) every Sunday morning and immersing myself in the Los Angeles Times for several hours.

Usually, my reading pattern wouldn’t waver much.  As I had when I was just a kid, I would start out by hitting the Sports section.  If the Dodgers, Lakers, or Kings won the night before I would spend a half hour there, carefully examining the standings, dissecting every word of the round-up and reading all the associated back-stories.  But if one of my teams lost, more often than not it was a quick scan followed by a jaunt over to the front section, then the Op-Ed page, and finally on to the Business section.

I think my early love of newspapers is probably why writing has always been an avocation of mine.

When I was in the ninth grade, I was the editor of my school newspaper.  I really enjoyed editing stories on our school sports teams and writing opinion pieces about the lousy cafeteria food.

In fact, I loved writing so much that I started a personal finance book project in 2001.  I wrote seven chapters or so before I eventually got sidetracked with the responsibilities that come with raising young children.  I ultimately abandoned the project, but there’s no need to cry for me.   The book sucked.

Still,  I never stopped reading the newspaper.  Or writing.

THE CREATION THROUGH PLENTY OF REJECTION

Over the years, the stuff I read in the Los Angeles Times would inspire me to write a letter to the editor.  For a while I was getting my letters printed there fairly frequently.  If I had to guess, I would say I wrote 50 letters to the editor.  Of those 50 letters, I bet I had at least a dozen letters published, but probably more, which is pretty good considering the amount of letters a newspaper with the circulation of the Times gets on a daily basis.

After awhile I decided I had even more to say and I wanted a wider audience.  So I started submitting 750 word op-ed pieces to the Times.  Sometimes I wrote pieces on business and political issues.  Other times they were silly puff pieces.  Regardless, they were continually being rejected.

Undaunted, I started sending my pieces to other newspapers: the Orange County Register, the San Diego Union-Tribune, USA Today, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, you name it.   Unfortunately, the results were the same.

I have to admit, after spending so much time researching and writing these articles, the never-ending stream of rejections was extremely disappointing and a bit of a blow to my self-esteem.

That’s when I decided to propose to the editor of my local fish wrap an idea for a weekly column.  I sent him three sample articles via registered mail and offered to write the columns for free.  The idea was loosely based on my current Black Coffee column.  When I sent the proposal my spirits were high.

Well, about a week later I received a nice hand-written letter from the editor, telling me that he appreciated the offer and enjoyed my writing style, but there was only so much space available in his paper.  Ironically, he couldn’t afford to allocate any space to me for a weekly column, even if I wrote for free; that precious space was needed for advertisements.  He did encourage me to solicit my idea to other newspapers and continue writing.

Finally, out of desperation, I decided to bypass the newspapers by going to the Internet and starting Len Penzo dot Com.

What’s interesting is that things didn’t get much better when I first started blogging.  A lot of it had to do with being stupid enough to start a personal finance blog using my name as the title, which is really not a very good idea unless your name is Dave Ramsey — or even Dave Ramsay.    I didn’t know that at the time though.  Like I said, I didn’t read blogs.  I read newspapers.

Anyway, despite my best efforts, after four months of blogging I was still averaging barely 40 unique visitors per day — 36 of which were relatives.  But I didn’t care because not having to get approval from a newspaper editor to get published was a very liberating experience for me.

Best of all, I finally had my own forum where I could write freely and be heard on a regular basis.  Even if it was only for a handful of my closest relatives!