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Reflecting on Four Years of Blogging

Matt Spillar

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Last week, on January 28th, marked four years since I published my first personal finance blog post on Spills Spot. You can read last year’s recap here.

It’s crazy to think that it’s been three years, and 199 posts. What most readers don’t know is that Spills Spot actually started as a small sports blog in March 2015, as a portfolio to help showcase writing samples for potential job opportunities. I went from thinking that blogging was just typing words onto a screen and clicking “Publish” to learning how much more it entails.

Making Financial Progress

After struggling to find a full-time job after graduating in 2013, I finally found the right fit. In May 2015, I began making $15/hour doing Content Marketing, and after three months became a salaried employee. Landing that job and finally making consistent income sparked my passion for personal finance. My wife and I had been married for about a year and had a combined $40,000 of student loan debt, plus a $15,000 car loan. I started to learn as much as possible, desiring to become debt free and remove the stress of money from our lives.

Slowly as our knowledge and communication grew, we began to see progress in our finances. We built up an emergency fund and started aggressively paying down our debt. We worked hard at our jobs, resulting in promotions and raises over the years. In March of 2018 we fully paid off our student loans, and a few months later we paid off our car loan to reach full debt freedom. Our net worth continued to grow, and we began our long-term pursuit of reaching financial independence.

Spreading the Message

As we continued to make progress on our personal finance journey, I found myself realizing that I wanted to share what I was learning  with as many people as possible. I wanted to encourage other people on their own journeys and help make a difference in their lives.

For some reason personal finance is rarely taught in schools, and this leaves many people left to fend for themselves and learn through trial by error. My number one focus is to inspire my generation to be more interested in personal finance and improve at managing their money.

This year I was able to encourage multiple friends to start investing and even gave a personal finance presentation for six high school students! It was an amazing feeling to be able to teach people the skills of financial literacy face-to-face, and this is something I’d like to continue to do.

Looking Back on My Blogging Journey

It’s been an incredible four years. I’ve continued to refine my writing, built new skills, formed bonds within the personal finance community, and strived to make an impact in people’s lives. Blogging is my creative outlet, a place I can share my thoughts and contribute to others’ learning. At times it can also be discouraging – there’s always someone with a bigger audience, better content, and a larger impact.

Overall, these past four years have all been well worth it. I’m still highly motivated to grow the site and reach more people. I’m proud of the 57,000 page views in 2019, which was significant growth over previous years!

Later this year I’ll be attending the Financial Freedom Summit, and get to connect with a group of bloggers and others from the financial independence community in person for the first time. This will be a great way to build new relationships and become further engrained in the community.

I continue to learn and grow as an individual, achieving new goals and progressing further along the path towards financial independence. I still love to write, and I love thinking of all the possibilities of where this blog can go in the coming years. As long as I’m able to make a positive impact on people’s lives, I will continue along this blogging journey.

As always, thank you for following along with me on Spills Spot! I wouldn’t be here without you, and there’s plenty more to come. Let me know if you have any specific questions or topics you’d like to see addressed this year, I’d be happy to cover them.

For more, check out my Top 10 Posts of 2019 and 2020 Goals

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