Sunday, 20 November 2022

Reflections on why I started blogging and can it be a side hustle?

I started this blog in 2017 and started writing more often in 2018. I came across many inspirational bloggers like Investment Moats, Turtle Investor, My 15 Hour Work Week and many other more before I started. It was nice to see how they wrote about their thoughts and opinions, more importantly, they recorded their investments or progress using the blog.

It was nice reading about their journey, learning from them on investing and personal finance. When reading their updates, it felt like I was growing in terms of knowledge and information. So then, I decided to start my blog since I was going to start investing mainly to record and have a place to look back in 5, 10 and even 20 years as I record not just my investments but thoughts and reflections.

First post and cringe at reading it

My first post was released on Tuesday, 5 September 2017 on STI ETF where I started buying NikkoAM STI ETF using POSB invest saver. It’s very cringe as I read the short post, it had a lot of emotions in it as I can feel the excitement of me starting and seeing the price fluctuations. I was 22 years old then but I sounded like a 14 year old in terms of excitement like I just bought a new toy haha.

If I recalled accurately, I got my adsense account at the beginning of 2018 and in 2018, I wrote a total of 70 articles. 2019, I wrote 68 articles, 2020 was 85 and 94 in 2021. It was exciting writing in 2021 as the market was on an uptrend and everyday we were hitting higher highs. 2022 on the other hand, has been tough and not much motivation to write, we are nearly at the end of the year and I have written about 50 articles and I think it is unlikely for me to beat the record number of 94 but I am all right with that.

The blog is a place for me to collect my thoughts or mark certain special occasions or achievements. So there will definitely be good and bad years. Hoping to have the motivation to continue writing on the blog for me to look back.

Can it be a side hustle?

I believe blogging can be a side hustle as well as a full-time gig as long as you have substantial traffic or can live on the income that can come in different forms (eg, affiliates, ads earnings and others). However, I would say currently for me, blogging is definitely not able to sustain my lifestyle and it would still be more of a hobby for me than a side hustle.

There are some prominent financial bloggers in Singapore and I would say that the blogging can earn you money but in terms of the earnings based on ads, it is not very substantial but it can create a platform for affiliate earnings or to accept advertisements to share your thought depending if you are all right with the product. Turtle Investor does share his side income which is a broad categoery, not just blogging and everything can build up to a substantial amount.

To be honest, I would say that majority of the financial bloggers in Singapore do not create a blog thinking it will make them rich but more of wanting to share or have a platform to record their thoughts and journey.

I am definitely not at a level of knowledge where I can create courses to share but I am learning through my journey of investing and being able to have a platform to share is great as I find myself researching and reading up before organising my thoughts and writing it into an article.

The internet allows you to create content easily

A recent blogger that I am reading on is Financial Samurai as his career and journey is so out of the norm. Together with his many other investments, blogging on Financial Samurai forms one of his active/passive income. Content creation is very easily accessible now as everyone as long as they can afford a smartphone, can download social media apps and start creating content. TikTok has got to be the fastest and easiest way now with short form video content that everyone can scroll and access.

I am sure you would know that I have a YouTube channel too which I basically repeat the content I write but I read it out and use stock videos and footages. However, it is pretty tedious to edit and create a video as it needs to be recorded and edited so ultimately I still prefer writing as I can pen my thoughts and edit it just by reading through.

I do earn a very minute amount from the ads I post on my blogs and it does serve as some form of motivation but much more is to see the progress and mistakes made along my journey. Happy and grateful to have an avenue for recording all these!

You can also find me on

Affiliate links/Codes:

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► Where I buy my stocks:
FSMone Referral: P0364886
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