January: A month of gratitude!

Here I am, corporate suit guy (who hates ironing) that finally decides to start blogging. I was inspired by a few people I’ve followed and commented on for a while (Millennial Boss and Physician On Fire) and finally wanted to join in.  Millennial Boss writes from a perspective I can’t see as a lady in a male dominated industry.  Physician on FIRE is inspirational because I’m a finance guy, not a tech guy.  If an anesthesiologist can figure this stuff out, then I can too.  Now that I’m done with that tangent…

I’m usually the most experienced person in the room at work, either via tenure with the company or with experience inside my specific segment of the company. This is just part of moving with a company, being part of a turnaround team, and staying with one organization for a long time. I usually know whats going on and its not often I see something NEW. Well, writing a blog is NEW. This is a lot more than just typing stuff into a computer.

You can do that, but how in the heck do you get people to read it? WTF is a word press plug in, how do people make their site look so fancy, what service do I choose for a mailing list? Geesh. I see why people quit in their first year, it takes a lot of time to figure this stuff out.

Well, January was an awesome month for Stop Ironing Shirts.  This was a month that’ll help keep me from being frustrated and saying “I quit”.  Traffic to the site quadrupled, even though I had to take a pause in the second half from publishing due to a number of distractions at work (good for a later story).

With that, I wanted to thank a number of people for their support that allowed January to be awesome:

Early Retirement Now:  ERN was gracious enough to use me as a case study regarding safe withdraw rates and help figure out some different variables on when to pull the plug. This was also picked up in Defined Sight’s Hump Day Heat.

John over at ESI Money: John allowed me to develop a second title, MI35 with publishing my Millionaire Interview.

My recent post of Early Retirement Decisions: One More Year, which featured real-time random thoughts running through my head got picked up by two large distribution lists:

Choose FI: Daily Email Feature

Physician On FIRE’s Sunday’s Best

This is really about spreading advice to the masses and I appreciate the support with all of the personal finance bloggers out there.  Here’s to many more successful months and beyond.