Weekend Edition: Where do we Go Now?

Oh, Hi there.

It’s the weekend, which means we can talk about whatever we like, with no pressure for life-changing articles. Whew.

I thought this would be a nice time to share a few bits of information on the state of this blog and of Mustachianism itself, with some speculation about the future as well.

1: Yay! 10,000 RSS Subscribers
At LAST, the semi-meaningless feedburner count (that orange logo on the right sidebar of the main page) has ticked above 10,000. Although it does not function as a count of how many people are reading the blog, it does at least correlate with the growth in readership. And I’ve always considered 10,000 to be a blog that had “really made it”. So here we are.

Are you wondering what RSS even is? It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a way that frequent website readers keep up with multiple blogs without having to visit the actual websites every day. If you use a personalized portal like iGoogle, you can arrange to have your Mr. Money Mustache articles appear aside your daily weather, news, stock updates, and other blogs feeds. RSS also makes reading on small-screen mobile devices convenient, if you use things like Feeddler for the iPhone or gReader for Android, or any number of thousands of other free options. If you ever need to, you can sign up for the MMM RSS feed at this link.

2: Whoa: 1.2 million Page Views per Month
Things have been getting crazy around here, with the site easily surpassing a million page views per month, and still growing due to crazy forwarding from users and media outlets. With numbers like that, anecdotal evidence suggests that this  might soon become the biggest non-corporate-owned personal finance blog in the US. Or maybe not. But either way, it’s worth celebrating all of those millions.

3. A plan for the future of Blog Moneymaking
As we’ve discussed in the past, people can make some real money off of these things. A blog with this traffic, appropriately spammified, could earn over $300,000 per year. Even with the current lower-key setup, I think the income has just hit $2000/month, matching the entirety of the MMM family’s spending. So I thought it would be fun for us to make some plans together for this large and probably ever-growing amount of income.

• 3a) Mr. and Mrs. Money Mustache shall get paid for working on the blog, although the amount shall not exceed $2000 per month, no matter how big it gets. I’m not sure why, but we still find it motivating to get paid at least a small salary for our work. Especially since the size of this blog job has displaced much of our other hobby activities, some of which provided (technically unneeded) income. However, the cash will end up being saved and invested anyway, with the scope and creativity of investments increasing over time.
• 3b) The blog shall have a budget for paying for its own expenses (web hosting, science experiments, paying people to help with technical issues, any promotional/conference travel, etc.). Not to exceed $1000 per month except in extremely fun circumstances that you’ll get to read about.
• 3c) 100% of all surplus income beyond this level shall go to a new charitable fund called the Money Mustache Foundation, that will try to do good in the world. Articles on the details are coming up this week, but it’s based on some reading I’ve been doing on the Gates foundation, and the book called The Life You Can Save.
• 3d) To start out the Mustache Foundation, I’ve just transferred $10,000 of the blog’s past earnings into a new investment account, where we can use it to generate some exciting returns, then use the proceeds for a series of ongoing donations. So we all get to learn about investing, AND efficient ways to donate surplus income over the coming months. If we’re smart enough, we might even be able to figure out how to structure it as a trust or nonprofit in the longer-term.

It’s an exciting next leg of this blog-writing journey, and I’m happy to have you along for the ride!