Where Are the Women in FIRE? Why I’m Monetizing This Blog From the Start

Where are the women in FIRE?

When I started creeping into the FIRE blogosphere, I found that one blog often led to another, and another, and so on. There are lots of people in this space! But I didn’t really find the women of FIRE until after reading about a lot of men. I’m not hating on the men, I’m just saying it took me a while to find blogs or podcasts written from a woman’s perspective. Angela of TreadLightlyRetireEarly.com has written about this and actively works to showcase women in FI.

Finding Making Sense of Cents

That’s how I found MakingSenseOfCents.com, a personal finance blog Michelle Schroeder-Gardner started back in 2011. She’s shared her story, and she monetized her blog to support her and her family’s financial journey.

One thing I will always love is seeing women entrepreneurs succeed, especially when they started from a passion project!

Monetizing with confidence

I love how unapologetically she monetized her work. I’ve read a lot of blogs where women felt the need to explain themselves (maybe like I’m doing here) and justify the worth of their work.

What this means for this blog

In that spirit, I’m going to follow in their footsteps and be upfront about monetizing this blog from the beginning. Ideally, I eventually earn enough to break even on this blog.

Here’s how I’m approaching it: I’ll only use referral or affiliate links for things I actually use and recommend, and I’ll never encourage you to buy something you don’t need. Any post with affiliate links will say so at the top, and you can read the details on my Disclosure page. (Writing a disclosure page was step 1!)

Learning as I go

That said, there are a few things I want to be clear about:

1. I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to monetizing a blog
2. I’ll document my experience and what I learn here, as a complete newbie!

That’s it! I hope you come along for the ride.