Today I interviewed Brian about the work he does on The Kid Wealth Blog, & I wanted to find out a little bit about himself and how he got into the blogging and what his plans are.
Brian’s Social Media Links Are:
- Website: https://kidwealth.com/
- Twitter:
- Instagram:
Can you tell our readers about yourself and your blog?
I’m Brian MacFarland and I run Kid Wealth. I’m 46 years old, with two boys, ages 8 and 9. Kid Wealth started in 2022, but I have been blogging about personal finance for 16 years. Our family reached financial independence and now I’m focusing on financial literacy for kids.
Describe how did you first get into blogging?
In 2006, I read an article about how people were blogging about how they deal with money issues anonymously. I had been interested in personal finance when I bought my first mutual fund in 1990, so I started following those blogs and soon created my own. With Kid Wealth, I’m starting over fresh. I have no ads and I sell no products or services.
Can you tell me some of your strengths that really helped you in blogging?
When I started in 2006, having a degree in software engineering was extremely helpful. Nowadays blogging is a lot less technical.
How would you describe your blogging style?
I write in a very conversational tone. Sometimes it’s too conversational as I use words like “really” a lot.
What do you think is the best service a blogger can provide to his readers?
Information. I started Kid Wealth with the idea that I would write unique articles. However, I’m finding that there are so many underserved financial literacy resources for parents and kids. I find that I’m curating and reviewing the other great stuff that’s already out there.
How do you manage time to run your blog efficiently?
It’s difficult because I have a lot of other commitments with the previous blog that I run, a dog boarding business, and the kids. My wife is military, so her schedule is very rigid compared to mine. Recently, I’ve been enjoying how Todoist helps keep me focused.
How do you want to improve yourself in the next year?
At age 46, I’m becoming more realistic about self-improvement. It was a huge focus for the last 20 years and now I just want to support family and friends while having fun. For example, I’ve been focused on frugality, investing, and other personal finance goals for a long time. This year we’re going on a ridiculously expensive Disney Cruise. Does checking off bucket list items count as self-improvement.
What was your greatest failure and what did you learn from that?
I don’t want to get into the specifics of what my greatest failure was. It’s very personal. However, I learned you just have to move on and focus on the positives and things that are going well.
Tell me about your proudest blogging achievement?
My previous blog inspired Early Retirement Extreme to start blogging who inspired Mr. Money Mustache. These blogs have become the fuel of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement. I also inspired Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income and Phil Taylor the creator of the FinCon, where thousands of personal finance content creators meet in person every year.
Who has impacted you most in blogging and how?
My wife was approached by an MLM/pyramid scheme salesperson about buying a $45 bottle of juice (MonaVie). I blogged about how ridiculous that was and got 6,000 comments and out-ranked the company itself for its product name. That led to emails asking about other MLMs and whether they were pyramid schemes too. I analyzed dozens of these companies and several of them sued me for defamation because my negative opinion ranked in Google and cost them sales. Defending the lawsuits consumes a lot of time and money. Fortunately, there are many more resources nowadays like LulaRich that didn’t exist in 2007.
What is your greatest achievement outside of blogging?
Supporting my military wife. She’s very high up the chain, running the regional facility of the national stockpile of emergency supplies.
What do you do in your spare time?
Spare time? I don’t know what that is. I am terrible at allocating specific time to things, so I just stream through my list of stuff that seems interesting.
Where would you like to be in the blogging world five years from now?
My vision of Kid Wealth isn’t to be a blog. I want it to be a bigger platform for advocating the importance of financial literacy at a young age. I want every adult to think, “Kids should know more about money. How do I make this happen?” And I want Kid Wealth to be the answer to this question.
What was the most challenging moment in your blogging journey so far?
It was the aforementioned lawsuits. I ended up winning all of them, but it was expensive even though I got lucky with some lawyers who helped me fight for the cause.
Can you name some of your favourite bloggers and explain why they are your favourites?
There are not a lot of bloggers in the child financial literacy space. There are a lot more authors of books for children and parents.
I really love Will Rainey from Blue Tree Savings. He has a great blog there, but his book, Grandpa Fortune Fables may be even better.
Rob Phelan who has an entrepreneurial course, The Simple Startup. He’s got a book for preschoolers and printable sheets for older kids. Ironically, he has just about everything, but a blog.
Anything else you would like the readers to know?
If you have kids you probably want them to be successful. Being awesome with money might be one of the most important steps to success. If you agree, please visit me at Kid Wealth and let’s get started.
Thank you for featuring me on your blog. I’ll be sure to pass it around to my readers.