Welcome back! This is the fourth instalment in my Life Update Series, where I record my accomplishments from the last month.
These posts are a way for me to remain accountable to myself for future months, and as a diary of what I have achieved so far. I cover statistics from my blog and socials, as well as things I did well/ not so well throughout the month.
Looking back, I can’t believe how quickly May went by. It feels like I just wrote my last update! Thankfully some great stuff happened in May that I’ve been keen to write about for some time.
The Good
Firespark Retreat
The Firespark Retreat was a 2-night FIRE-focused event held in Queenscliff, Victoria.
The event had about thirty attendees in total, getting together to discuss all things FIRE.
We stayed at the Whitehall Guesthouse in Queenscliff, which was an excellent choice of venue. Our group had full and exclusive access to the building, which included a conference hall, professional kitchen, and bedrooms for every guest.
It was a fantastic weekend full of workshops and seminars about frugality, purpose, lifestyle design, sharing stories, and above all else having fun.
Despite being a weekend with so many fantastic moments, I have two standout parts from the event:
- Meeting and chatting to lots of people on the journey towards Financial Independence, and learning about what the journey means to them.
Everyone I spoke to had extremely varied goals. Some were new to FIRE, and some were already retired! It was great to chat with like-minded people and share information and strategies to achieve both financial and non-financial goals.
- Participating on a Q&A panel discussion with my friend Bob – who runs the Melbourne FIRE Brigade Messenger group chat – as well as Captain FI and Serina Bird – The Joyful Frugalista.
The discussion was also recorded and uploaded on Serina’s Joyful Frugalista podcast. If you want to hear me (and of course the other panel members!) discuss some great FIRE-related questions, give it a listen below! If you enjoy it, let me know what you think via Facebook or X or share the episode with a friend.
Serina’s New Book
I was lucky enough to receive a signed copy of Serina’s newest book: How To Pay Your Mortgage Off In 10 Years (Even When Interest Rates Are Going Up). I’ll be posting a book review about it in the next few weeks, and add my thoughts on the topic of mortgage optimisation.
Serina’s insights at the retreat were fantastic, and in addition to receiving the book, I enjoyed lunch with her and her partner before the retreat had officially started. Lucky me for not eating lunch before I arrived!
I can’t sing the praises of the Firespark Retreat enough. It was a great way to meet people in the FIRE community and share stories about finding a purpose beyond just saving money.
Continued Writing about my Personal Philosophy
My personal philosophy has quickly become the focus of this blog. While I started my website to share my thoughts on FIRE, by the time I got around to writing I found that my opinions on FIRE had changed.
My focus is on sharing how I have analysed what FIRE stands for, and applied the best parts of it to my life. I believe that by itself, FIRE doesn’t solve every problem in our lives, and we need to add additional things to FIRE to create our ideal life.
I published three articles that fit into that philosophy in May:
- Reduce Your Consumption (of Money & Time)
- Increase Your Self-Reliance
- The Hedonic Treadmill & The Pursuit of More
As I mentioned last month, I plan on completing every article that comprises this philosophy by the end of the year. Thankfully, I’m still on-track to do this!
Shared My Writing With Friends & Family
I mentioned this above, but it deserves its own section.
I shared my writing publicly with my friends and family via my personal Facebook profile.
This was a bit nerve-wracking especially as I have put a lot of effort into the site.
Thankfully, the feedback I received was all positive and encouraging.
I’m glad that it went well and didn’t cause any of the issues that I thought it might. It’s easy to overthink stuff like this, but sometimes you just need to eat the frog and do it.
The Not-So-Good
While this month had some great moments, there are some things I want to address in this life update as I feel they have held me back this month.
Gaming
It’s no secret that I enjoy video games. They’ve come up a few times in my other Life Update posts.
But this month was a little off the rails, even by my standards.
I’ve recently gotten back into Old School Runescape, a 20 year old medieval point & click PC (& mobile) adventure game. This game was a mainstay of my childhood, and after watching a few too many videos about the game on YouTube, I found myself getting hooked back in.
The game is notorious for requiring extreme amounts of time to progress and skill up your character. Some skills require dozens of in-game hours to level up to the maximum level, which people willingly do just to wear a cool cape afterwards.
And for some reason, I thought it would be a great use of my time!
While it has been fun playing the game, I have noticed that other aspects of my life suffered during that time. I found myself getting sucked into the game world of Gielinor a bit too much, to the detriment of my content, diet, and fitness.
Combined with work, the free time I once had in abundance had disappeared.
Looking back, I didn’t like how much of the games I played this month. So I’ve decided to take a little break from it (and gaming in general) so that I can get some stuff done on my blog and get other things in my life back to normal.
Life Update Statistics
I post the statistics of my blog and socials for posterity. I want to capture this information so that I can see the progress from one month to the next.
It’s not my intention to get competitive about the numbers. I’m sure many accounts have grown faster than mine, and many have grown slower. The stats simply are what they are.
- Total blog posts published: 21 > 25 (+4 this month)
- Website views last month: 30 > 85 (+55 month on month)
- X posts: 668 > 688 (+20)
- X impressions for month: 5,000 > 500 (-90%)
- X followers: 33 > 38 (+5)
- Facebook followers: 24 (new)
I’ve posted the stats from last month and this month, as well as the change from month to month.
These stats line up with what I expected. I’ve been less active online than I planned, which explains my X impression. But I did publicly share my writing with friends and family this month, so the dramatic spike in website views is expected.
I’m planning to do some extra work on the blog this month, so hopefully I can pump these numbers up for next month.
Last Month’s Goals
Let’s see how I did on the goals set in the last Life Update:
Consistency
Consistency achieved for this month!
Last month, I changed my posting schedule from twice to once a week. This made sense due to working 4 days a week, and allowed me to focus on delivering what I believe is quality writing.
Keeping up with my writing is essential. I want to grow this site into a repository of my thoughts on living an intentional life, saving and investing, and doing things you love. This content will ideally become a roadmap to allow anyone to achieve this in their own life.
I want to keep this up, so this will be an active goal.
Engaging on Social Media
This one didn’t go so well. As I mentioned, I was planning to do this but then I found myself focusing on other things.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed what happened in May. Video games that are fun are fun. But I want to work on this site and get more involved with the FIRE community, as this was one of the things I enjoyed most about the retreat. So I’ll keep this as an active goal.
Goals for Next Month
I have a few additional goals for this month:
Update Website
I think my website is pretty cool, if lacking in functionality. I want to update the site in a couple of ways:
Update the Home Page
I want my home page to serve as a guide about what my site is all about. Pointing visitors to my personal philosophy in the header is one thing, but I believe showcasing that philosophy front and centre will serve me well. I’ll be experimenting with this during June.
Create an Email List
I want to give you the ability to subscribe to site updates via email. With an email collection widget on the site, you’ll be able to opt-in to receiving updates about the blog and my content.
I want to do this properly and am taking data collection seriously, so I will only put this out when I think it’s ready. And I want to be sure that the emails I send out are also of a high quality.
Ideally I will get this sorted in June, but we will see.
Avoid Bad Habits
This one is self-explanatory at this point. I need to ensure I don’t let my gaming habit get out of control this month.
A little gaming is great for me. But a lot can be detrimental, and keeps me from doing the other stuff I want to do.
This month, I want to shift my attention back towards my content and website.
Closing
May was a great month overall, and looking at the stats I’m really impressed with how it went.
I’m glad the change in content posting worked out too. Hopefully I get the blog updates done and make my site and content offerings even better in the future.
Thank you for reading.
For the first time since starting my blog, I’ve decided to enable comments on a post. If you enjoyed this one and you’d like to leave a comment, please do so. It would be great to engage more with people who enjoy what I write.
If this goes well, I’ll experiment with enabling comments on certain posts in the future.
If you’d like to read more of my articles, check out previous posts on the blog, and follow me on X @ScottOnFire and Facebook @Scott On Fire.