Enchumbao is Taking a New Direction to Better Serve You

Hola, mi gente! Today we’re sporting a new look on Enchumbao. Wepa! I think you’re going to like what we have coming your way: we have a new design and direction for our blog. No, we’re not moving to Cuba, although that picture makes me want to be there. It’s the blog that is changing direction, not us. LMAO

We’ve been doing some serious ‘soul searching’ for Enchumbao for a while. Along the way, we dove deep into what are the issues affecting our readers and we’re finally ready to unveil the new look, mission, and reasons why you should stick around, because the best is truly yet to come. Lo mejor está por venir. 🙂

The #1 reason why we started blogging

For the past three years, our main priority has been to document our journey to FI on this blog, while trying to bring value to our readers by writing mostly about how to achieve financial independence and early retirement. Writing also helps us understand the topics better.

Many early retirees started blogging after they retired and I thought it would be nice to start writing while we were on our journey, so that we could have a library of articles explaining how we did it, in real time.

A new mission

Even though we don’t have much spare time to dedicate to the blog, we managed to publish over 100 posts since we started blogging. It’s a bit difficult to post on a set schedule for us, as there are multiple priorities competing for our time, but we still want our writing to be meaningful and continue to change other people’s lives for the better.

We’ll continue to document our journey, but the time has come for us to help the others that are coming behind us in more impactful ways.

Our new mission is to help people like you understand this money thing. There’s a big cohort of people who, for one reason or another, are not exposed to any personal finance education. The only “education” most people get nowadays is how to pile up debt. We want to reach out to these people and help them bigly.

We want to be able to improve their financial situation by providing the financial information and tools they need to make it happen.

I want to see people like my nieces and nephews at FIRE meet-ups. I hate to use labels, but they all fall under the Hispanic Millennials cohort. There’s research showing that Hispanic millennials shoppers are a ‘driving force’ in the U.S. economy.

Do you know how I read that?

This group is spending more money than others instead of saving and investing that money. There’s a lot work to be done with Hispanic Millennials. If you’re a gastador, we’re coming for you, in a good way.

We also would like to see more bilingual and multi-racial people than just us at FIRE gatherings. Only when we feel that there’s a balanced, diverse crowd represented at gatherings, as well as reading personal finance blogs, would we feel that we’re doing our “job”.

We rise and fall as one

At the end of the day, we are all Americans and we rise and fall as one. I feel that it’s our duty to help those who want to make progress in their journey, but don’t know where to begin. The message that we preach doesn’t always have to fall on deaf ears if we communicate with people, who have a different experience, differently.

Our new mission is to also help those who struggle with money because it’s a lot better for humanity if we can get ten people to save 5% more of their income than one person to save 50%. Just one small positive habit, such as increasing a savings rate, is all that one person might need to get the snowball rolling.

So we’re going to break down the concept of money management and wealth building. I feel that we tend to complicate personal finance topics too much in the FI community and end up writing for other bloggers. I’m guilty of that as well. We want to simplify these topics as much as possible, so that there’s no excuse on the table for someone with a similar background like ours not to pursue financial independence. Esta vaina se puso seria!

More insightful content to better serve our audience

Moving forward, we’ll be doing more collaborations as we introduce new series, interviews and case studies. We analyzed what posts have been popular with our readers, since we have three years of data, and will build upon those articles.

We also went back to blogging 101 to see what things we need to be doing differently. Starting from ground zero helps look at things from a new perspective.

What content does our audience want? We didn’t have to go to far to find suitable content to write about. Why pay for research when you have friends and family that can provide the much needed juice for content ideas? 🙂

Categories

We streamlined our categories to better position our upcoming posts. Here are our revised categories:

1. Debt
2. Money Management
3. Money Matters
4. Wealth Building
5. Financial Independence
6. Early Retirement
7. Relationships and Money
8. Income Streams
9. Savings
10. Lifestyle
11. Travel
12. Miscellaneous

Some categories like Relationships and Money are categories that we have barely written for, so I’m very excited about where we can take this.

Lifting up our community

My wife and I are in this special situation where we can soon retire and won’t have to worry about making money to pay for our lifestyle. We understand that not everyone is in the same boat, but we weren’t privileged. We came from poor backgrounds and got to this point because we worked hard and found financial independence along the way.

The path to wealth is simple, but it takes work

I’m a Latino with a light accent. When I started doing things differently in my life, from going to college all the way to a corporate job, I’d always end up being the only Latino in a room full of people. Even if I was the only Latino in the room, that didn’t stop me from becoming successful and wealthy in life. You just keep at it, without giving up. You get better each day, stay relevant and people start to recognize your potential.

I’m happy to see that as we get ready to exit the corporate world, things are changing. We’re seeing a little more diversity along our path. We can’t say the same for the personal finance world yet and that’s where I think we can contribute with Enchumbao.

There are people graduating from college that have no clue of how a 401(k) or investing works, because they weren’t exposed to it while growing up. They might not be getting into debt like their parents did, but they aren’t saving as much as they could either because they don’t understand how this works. Now that we figured out our FI journey and everything is mostly on autopilot, it’s time to give back to the community by helping others that are right behind us.

We’re changing the blog’s direction, but the essence will still be there. We’re not taking away, but we’ll be rather adding more diverse content. I think we found our niche, nuestra voz, in the personal finance community.

Thanks for tuning in and feel free to browse our refreshed site! Check out the revised page about us and sign up to receive the upcoming awesome new posts in your inbox.

What would you like to see more of on Enchumbao? What would make this blog awesome for you? Are there any topics that you would like us to write about? We appreciate your input.