You’ve decided to work at home as a blogger! Congrats! But, that might mean living on one income. Setting financial goals as a blogger is important when you’re new to blogging.
Your blog won’t generate income for a while and that might mean bootstrapping your blogging until you start making money with your blog.
And if you are no longer working that 9-5 job and you’re not generating income, then you need to cut expenses, live frugally and plan your monetization strategy for your blog.
But, that doesn’t have to sound like a bad thing!
Blogging is a creative outlet and fun! I’ve been doing this for four years and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
And now that I have my time management goals figured out, my blogging goal ideas created, I can focus on my financial goals!
Before we get into the nitty gritty of this post, if you haven’t started a blog, check out my easy and tech-free tutorial on starting a mom blog!
Let’s go through five financial goals you should have in place if you want to work at home as a mommy blogger.
1. Organize Your Finances
One of the first things you need to go through is organizing your finances.
Do you keep all your business receipts for tax time? How about household receipts and other paperwork?
Make it a goal to organize your financial space both physically and digitally.
There are online tools like Wave, QuickBooks Self-Employed, Hurdlr that can help you keep track of your business receipts digitally and help with accounting and bookkeeping.
Make sure to get your financial paperwork and statements organized both digitally and physically, so tax and budgeting time is easy.
Physically organize household statements like tax, vehicle, home, banking, other important statements in a file folder box and keep them for at least 4 years.
If you’d rather keep things digitally, Evernote is a great online app that offers a free version.
2. Track All the Money Coming In and Out
As a blogging mom, you can’t afford to let any money slip out of your hands, you need to know where every dollar is going.
If you aren’t already on a household budget, now is the time start one for both home and business.
You Need a Budget (YNAB for short) is the most recommended tool for this.
It is a paid app, but it allows you to run multiple budgets, has extensive customer service help if you ever need it, and lets you create various categories and subcategories of expenses.
You can also try free budget apps like Everydollar and Mint or just use a simple spreadsheet, but the important thing here is that you’re tracking your money.
Getting on a budget is an important financial step for you to take and lays the foundation to all your other financial goals.
You won’t know how much you can save or spend until you know exactly much money is coming in or going out of your home and business.
Some expenses for blogging might be (aside from a laptop and internet connection):
- Your web host
- WordPress theme
- Email service provider like ConvertKit
- Social media scheduler like Tailwind
- Blogging courses to help you become more successful quicker
3. Save for Emergencies
Starting an emergency fund should be high on your priority list because as a mom blogger you might encounter irregular income. One month your affiliate marketing income might be double than the previous month, but your eBook sales decreased by 70%.
And if you decide to offer a service like freelance writing, you’ll find that some months client work will be non-stop, and payments will arrive on time.
But other months it seems clients have all gone on vacation at the same time and no one seems to be able to pay on time.
So, you’ll want to have a stash of cash in a savings account only for household expenses. You should be able to cover expenses for at least 6 months.
This gives you a buffer in case you’re not able to produce income for that time.
If you haven’t started a mom blog and really want to, make sure to sign up to my free start a mom blog course just for you!
4. Save for Retirement
When you start blogging, you don’t necessarily need to think about retirement! But, it doesn’t hurt to!
In the U.S. those who are self-employed are able to save money for retirement in a Roth IRA, SEP IRA, or Solo 401k.
In Canada, there are similar retirement vehicles like an RRSPs and TSFAs. Just because you’re a stay-at-home mom blogger, it doesn’t mean you don’t get to have your own retirement fund.
Do some research into your own options based on where you live. One day you’ll want to retire – travel in an RV anyone? – so make it a goal to start saving money now and take advantage of compounding interest.
5. Set a Financial Plan Everyone Can Follow
Involve the rest of the family in the budget and include them in smaller financial goals like these:
- Save x amount of money towards the emergency fund to have at least 6 months worth by a specific date
- Hold budget meetings every Sunday
- Pay off all debt by a specific date
- Get rid of credit cards to prevent new debt
- Save x amount of money by a certain date for a family vacation
- Find ways to reduce household expenses
- Switch to paying cash for things like food, gas, clothing, gifts, eating out, transportation, etc.
- Brainstorm other ways to increase stay-at-home blogging income
Start a Mom Blog And Start Making Money
As part of your financial goals, you should have stretch goals for your blog.
What do you want to earn from blogging after you start your blog?
How will you plan for making money blogging?
The process I went through to start generating income from blogging was first offer a service. I became a freelance writer for small businesses. I would write content, like this one, and get paid up to $600.
I then dipped my toes into coaching other freelance writers and doing some affiliate marketing. I then created a course and stopped coaching as a way to save time since I was writing for clients and my blog and I was taking care of twin toddlers.
From there I started niche blogs and grew my business to include those blogs as a way to make money.
But, in the beginning, my income was variable and since both my husband and I worked from home, we were penny pinchers and worked hard at sticking to our budget. And now that we moved to a new house, we are still budgeting!
Over to you – are you a new blogger and work at home mom? What are your top financial goals to help you make money with your mom blog?
List them in the comments! And if you want, list your stretch goal for your blog!
And thank you to Christine for helping me write this post!
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