This is going to be a short post today. With the Thanksgiving holiday around the corner, who wants to think about Safe Withdrawal Rate research, when you’re digesting vast quantities of turkey breast, turkey legs, fillings, and beer? So, on a lighter note, I want to say Thanks to all the folks who have made blogging such an enjoyable experience over the last year!
Specifically, …
Thanks to the visitors from 171 different countries!
About 80% of visitors come from the U.S., but let’s not forget all the visitors from abroad! We covered pretty almost all of North and South America and Europe. Folks in Greenland, Yemen, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and a few dozen other countries have other things on their minds than early retirement simulations, but I’m sure we can entice some of them to stop by in the future!
Thanks to everyone who nominated this blog for the Plutus Awards!
In early October I almost fell off my chair when I saw this small niche blog was among the finalists for the 2017 Blog of the Year Plutus Award. Together with so many heavy hitters in the PF world! How amazing is that?
In the end, we didn’t win. The trophy went to the excellent Well Kept Wallet site. Well deserved and congrats! But thank you, thank you, thank you so much to all of our faithful readers and subscribers who submitted their ballot and voted for the ERN blog!
Thanks to everybody who’s sending traffic to the ERN blog!
- Number 1 referrer: Search Engines! Pretty amazing, because I consider myself a complete SEO (search engine optimization) novice. But if you go to Google and start entering “early re” then there it is: “early retirement now” is already a recognized Google search term suggestion. Two spots higher than “early response pregnancy test!” I hope this doesn’t mean that the early retirement online community is crowding out the more, ahem, person-to-person interaction in today’s society!
- Finance forums: Bogleheads and Reddit discussions apparently send over a lot of traffic. I can’t promote my own work there but thanks to all the ERN blog fans and friends linking to the Safe Withdrawal Rate Series and our other work in the various forums.
- Social Media: Twitter and Facebook send over significant traffic. I can’t even see what specific tweet or FB page the referral came from, but I suspect a lot is coming from the awesome and growing ChooseFI Facebook group!
- Also in the top 10: Other bloggers/podcasters. A special “thank you” goes to Dr. PoF at Physician on FIRE who featured us no less than seven times this year in his “Sunday’s Best” write-up of his favorite links! Rounding up the top 10 are Jonathan and Brad at ChooseFI who featured me on their podcast for a discussion of Sequence Risk and many other topics, J Money at Budgets Are Sexy who ran my guest post in January, Fritz at The Retirement Manifesto, and Retire By 40!
Thanks to everybody who’s leaving feedback!
We got close to 2,000 comments so far in 2017! Well, almost half of them are mine because I try to respond to almost all of them. I get tons of comments and suggestions via email as well. Thanks to the seven volunteers so far in the “Ask Big Ern series” where I work out case studies on safe withdrawal rate calculations! Pretty much every post you see here week in week out has been in some way, shape or form inspired by feedback from the readers! Thanks for your support and inspiration!