Posted: 28 Aug 2008 01:11 AM CDT

This blog Fivecentstencents was started because I have an interest in writing about personal finance topics and in sharing my thoughts and opinions about living within your means, saving and investing, growing and protecting your means. As part of that process, I developed additional blogs that spun off from the original fivecentstencents.

Over time, I realised that one of them, Singapore Fixed Deposits, has generated the bulk of the traffic and resultant AdSense income over time. This is despite it requiring much less effort and time to maintain compare to this blog.

Traffic wise and Alexa ranking wise, fivecentstencents is higher than Singapore Fixed Deposits but yet due to the nature of the niche and because it is better equipped for organic search traffic due to people searching for terms such as “best singapore fixed deposits”.

Many paths lead to money

The lesson I learnt from this experience is first that taking action to develop your “muse” or semi-passive income is better than just trying to spend time planning, planning and planning without doing anything. The other lesson I learnt was the pareto principle or 80-20 rule where 80% of results typically come from 20% of the really important stuff you need to focus on.

My Singapore Fixed Deposits blog works quite on autopilot as compared to Fivecentstencents. I spend only 20% of the time uploading information to that blog but it earns much more than my other blogs including Fivecentstencents. Thus, I can see for myself that in the area of blog monetisation, the pareto principle rings true.

Why am I sharing with you this point?

The point I’m making is that in your quest for financial freedom and in growing your means, you may need to try out different types of investments or ways to help achieve your goal. Some means may not work e.g. 4D, TOTO or lottery, some means work but grow slowly e.g. blog monetisation. But unless you try and learn from your experiences, it is challenging to achieve any degree of success in growing your means simply by relying on earned income alone. There’s nothing wrong in earned income, but I realise that really when you are not financially free, there is a significant degree of leverage your employers have on you knowing that you are beholden to your earned income for living.

The degree to which you decouple your living from earned income, the better control you achieve in deciding what you want to do with your life.

Currently, I am going through a few personal upheavals in my life that cover work, family and my own personal issues. Work-wise there has been many transitions and it looks like there are more to come. Family wise, I can say that I have gone through one of the most trying times in terms of relationships with my family and thank God I manage to survive through it. The upheavals have left me with a degree of clarity in life, in that really it is about putting relationships and family first, work and income issues should come in second to this.

Balancing work-life-money

But I’ve also come to realise that life is not just about maximising your streams of income to achieve financial freedom. It is about balancing the competing demands on your life to achieve the balance between earning enough for your needs, building up your retirement funds for the future and in living a simple life so that money becomes a less critical part in overall deliberations.

I have reached a personal threshold in realising that because circumstances have made me re-evaluate what is important in my life at this point in time. And money while being important is not the be-all and end-all. My daughter’s birth has made me realise that while money will provide her with a more comfortable life, my ability to pacify her and rock her to sleep means much more to her now that she needs to have good rest to grow up strong and healthy.

Be well and prosper.

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