The About Series: What is Think, Save, Retire?

I thought that I would take a break from writing about saving cash and complaining about this and that and instead focus on what exactly I'm doing here.  What am I trying to prove?  What's my goal?  Is there even a point to this blog?  If so, what is it?

First, a challenge: I challenge other bloggers out there to continue the 'About Series'.  What makes you and your blog tick?  What's your motivation?  Why do you keep coming back to the keyboard and typing a bunch of stuff into the computer for others to read?  The key to making these blog posts great is telling us something that's not already on your 'about' page.  Give us the juicy details behind what we read on your blog.  Pretend these details are a medium-rare steak - the juicier, the better!

Ready?  Let's go.

Think Save Retire is my little space on the web - a blog that I started with my wonderfully supportive math-wiz of a wife towards the end of 2014 after we decided our goal was to retire early.  At first, the blog was my way to offer up some money tips and generally lament about standard American spending habits - in fact, my first ever blog post was an easy one, Starbucks!  That was cool, but slowly I began to expand.

Now, I talk generally about the softer side of financial independence, like the ability to control your mind, sit back and relax and take stock of your life.  I question things like the need for an expensive college education at a so-called prestigious university, and often wonder where I'd be had I been focused on early retirement earlier on in my life.

What about the name?  The name of every blog that I've ever started has always been one of the toughest parts of the process.  You want the name to be creative, but also easy to spell, easy to remember and recognize and, if possible, needs to still be available in the .com domain extension.  If the .com is taken it's not the end of the world, but if people are trying to get to your blog without clicking on a link, the .com is generally the first domain extension they will try.

Here, I decided to focus on the process of retiring early because I knew that I wanted to talk about more than just money and finances.  Retiring early is more encompassing than that, and I needed the blog's name to portray those additional elements of this lofty goal.  And bingo, ThinkSaveRetire.com was available, so I pounced on it.

My writing style is pretty typical, I think, of many bloggers.  Rather than work on blog posts over the course of a few days, I have periods of extreme inspiration and want to write - sometimes for hours.  I've been known to write posts on the spur of the moment and post them almost immediately if the mood strikes me.  My post about my wife making $100,000 her bitch is a good example of this phenomenon in action!

In general, you won't find many numbers throughout these pages, except for our net worth calculation on the right and within our budget articles.  I find numbers to be fairly boring.  I don't want to read a bunch of math, and I'm betting you probably don't either.

I also don't write excruciatingly long articles, either - you don't want to sit there and read all that, and I don't want to sit here and write all that, so it's a win-win!  I try to get to the point as quickly as I can and make your precious free time reading blogs count, damnit.  If I write a blog post that's more than 1200 or 1300 words, that's a LOT for me.

Moving on...

Important note: We are not a business.  I am not trying to sell you anything...that's right, not even early retirement.  No books.  No newsletters.  No pamphlets.  No...anything.  My goal isn't to build the most popular early retirement blog, either.  It's not to have a huge readership, or thousands of Twitter followers, or make thousands off of this blog.  The truth is I earn pennies...literally, pennies, with that single ad placement on the right.

I blog because it keeps me focused and motivated to achieve my goals and learn as much as I possibly can about finances.  Though I'm certainly not trying to impress anyone with my blog, I still do want to write engaging and interesting content for those who do read my blog.  I'm usually thinking off and on about my next topic and what I think interests me as well as what would probably interest my readers.

Sometimes I'll hear something on the radio that will spark a new article.  But more often, I get my ideas from you good people.  I read a LOT of your blogs, and I generally love every one of them.  Most are written from the heart and truly reflect the blogger behind the scenes.

And that's what I'm trying to use my little blog for: genuine blog content that is written straight from the heart.

Most of the time I'm brutally honest.  Sometimes I swear.  Sometimes I get overly emotional and have to delete huge paragraphs of profanity-laced shit because I got carried away.  But hey, that's me.  Take it or leave it, what you see here is the genuine article of yours truly.

And that is primarily what this blog is about.  We're giving you the straight scoop about our plans to quit corporate America and travel for a living while we are still young, active and relatively sane.

And if you're able to take anything from this blog and apply it to your life, that'll make starting and maintaining this blog totally worth it to me.

Thanks for reading, and stop spending so much damn money!  :)