Posted: 01 Jan 2009 08:10 PM CST

The beginning of the year is the time to embark on new initiatives, to break-through new frontiers and to seek to challenge yourself to become even better in the various areas of your life.

Look Back at Five Cents Ten Cents

Five Cents Ten Cents has come a long way since its humble birth 678 days (1 year 10 months) ago on 22 February 2007. It started out as a blog using blogger platform as it was free and interface quite user-friendly for a relative newbie to blogging. As I learnt more about personal finance, blogging and in Web 2.0 technologies, I decided to go one step further and migrated Five Cents Ten Cents to a paid host (3ix) using wordpress as the publishing platform.

Blogger allowed me to learn in a fun setting and it was this phase of growth that introduced me to the concept of blog monetisation and AdSense. Since then, I’ve embraced Web 2.0 in its many forms such as social networking through my online participation in hardwarezone forums as well as sgfunds and related forums. My twitter and plurk presence was also established as part of my experimentation with these micro-blogging (some people say time wasting platforms).

The Path Ahead: Road Map for 2009

In line with simplifying my life, the path ahead for this blog is direct and straightforward. It is described in the following vision and mission statements:

Vision: To empower individuals towards financial freedom, one realistic step at a time.

Mission: To be the preferred online personal finance resource in Singapore, through sharing of knowledge, building of skills and fostering a community of financially free individuals.

In order for me to fulfil the vision and mission for Five Cents Ten Cents, I would embark on the following 3 key initiatives for 2009:

1) Improve Useability (Target: March 2009)

It is coincidental that when I checked the statistics for this blog, 29 December 2008 had the highest number of page views at 593. This is a record since I ported over to my own host using wordpress. The more readership I have, the more I need to provide a great user experience in navigating through my blog.

2) Themed Posts and Series (Target: January 2009 – 1st Series to be published)

My blogging strategy has been mostly mining my thoughts that I write down in my PDA as well as tracking current affairs that have an impact on personal finance (e.g. CPF rule changes, statistics on bankruptcies etc). I realise that some of the posts that have long-legs, i.e. are relevant and still read by you are those that delve a bit more in-depth into issues such as retirement or my book review on “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.

I’ll continue to do more of such posts because it challenges me to go more into a topic and would require more research and insights on such areas.

3) Stories and Parables (Target: March 2009 – 1st story/parable post to be published)

As a toastmaster, I did an Advanced Project Manual on Story-Telling. For those who are not toastmasters, a project manual is a do-it-yourself speech training where you are given instructions on how to craft and deliver a  5-7 minute (or sometimes it can be 10-13 minutes) speech to develop certain speaking skills. The Story-Telling manual does that, it teaches you how to tell personal stories, stories about historical figures or events in history and even fairy-tales. I’ll be crafting some posts that go along the line of stories or parables to allow the fundamental principle behind a personal finance story to come out through the characters. This will take some time so I’ve given myself a fairly generous timeline of March 2009 (haha!)

4) Panzer’s Guide to Financial Freedom Book II (April 2008)

I’ve been encouraged by the number of readers for my first ebook, “Panzer’s Guide to Financial Freedom: It’s Your Money and It’s Your Life”. It is a deliberately short book (15 pages) to distill some of what I’ve been saying in this blog: live within your means, save and invest, grow and protect your means. I am still thinking about how I want to approach my second book. I am inclined towards a work-book type of format as I believe that whilst understanding the personal finance principles is well and good, but applying it to your life makes the world of difference in the quality of your life.

Parkinson’s Law tells us that “work expands to fill the time available”. I’ve set a tight deadline to push myself to get started on this. The feedback I received from my first ebook shows me that publishing an ebook is a powerful way to reach out to more people. The number of people who visit my Panzer’s Guide section now outnumbers any of my regular posts.

Tracking Outcomes

Given that I’ve publicly stated my goals for Five Cents Ten Cents 2008, this post will serve to remind myself of whether I’ve delivered on my targets. I won’t beat myself up if I miss one or two deadlines but I’ll add some references to this post in future posts as constant reminder for me to be focussed on the outcomes and goals I’ve set for myself. Offline, I’ll create a Freemind mindmap to track specific tasks and activities, what the Getting Things Done (GTD) movement likes to call “next actions”.

These help me plan and execute by making myself think of what I should be doing next to propel these projects forward.

Do you have a blog? Are you thinking of improving it?

Share with Panzer your experiences!

Be well and prosper.

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