After selling Money Under 30 to XLMedia in 2018 and working for the company in various roles, I said goodbye in January 2022. I took a sabbatical then began looking for an entirely different kind of opportunity. I invested in an area development contract to develop FYZICAL Therapy & Balance Centers here in Maine. After two decades of working on websites, I was drawn to a brick-and-mortar business with the potential to make a face-to-face impact in patients’ lives.
Not six months later, I learned that XLMedia, under financial pressure, was looking to divest its personal finance division. I ended up buying Money Under 30 back. I’ll post soon about why I did so.
The recipe for Money Under 30’s success was the right ratio of creativity, financial expertise, and compassion for my audience. XLMedia’s recipe was monetization, monetization and monetization. Ever since, traffic to the site has been in steady decline, and for good reason.
I do not know if I can return Money Under 30 to growth. In 2024, it’s a tall order for any website that relies on search traffic from Google as AI rapidly changes the way we ask questions and discover content online. But, by the end of this year, I hope to have restored the site to a place where I’m again proud to be its founder.
In parallel, I continue to support the development of FYZICAL franchisees in Maine. FYZICAL locations are now open in Portland and Bangor, with three additional protected territories sold in Maine.
Deciding to invest in — and now owning — these two businesses has forced a lot of personal growth over the past 18 months. I have more confidence around how I want to spend the rest of my career. Although I’m still working on the details, I am hoping to build a business or a practice around my interests in:
- The relationships among money, consumption, and happiness.
- Financial trauma and how our childhood experiences can create lifelong financial dysfunction.
- New retirement rules: Why balancing a lifetime of work and leisure beats working 30 years then stopping altogether.
- “Mindful money”: How to reconcile the Buddhist teachings of non-attachment and the cessation of desire with the Western experience of living in societies fixated on material accumulation.
More soon. If you have questions or just want to get in touch, please contact me.