Holy Shit, We’re the Year’s Best Personal Finance Blog?!

Well, butter my bread and call me a biscuit! Bitches Get Riches just won the 11^th Annual Plutus Award for Personal Finance Blog of the Year.

We’ve actually been up for this award every year since we launched this blog in 2017. But of course 2020 would be our year, wouldn’t it?!

I’ve decided I find it the ultimate compliment to be considered the best personal finance blog in 2020. This supremely wretched year has been packed with so much darkness and chaos. Maybe the traditional advice-dispensers—the people who really know what they’re doing, and have perfect faith in our world and its systems—found themselves as lost as everybody else.

Luckily, our tumultuous lives have trained Piggy and I in the crucial survival skill of making absolutely fucking everything up as we go along.

Perhaps we aren’t the noble lions of this world, but the crafty raccoons! We’re adept at digging through garbage with our creepy little trash!panda hands to find the next morsel of sanity and stability. And since there’s never been a year with more garbage to sort through, doesn’t it make sense that this was our time to shine?

The Plutus Awards

For the five of you who aren’t personal finance nerds, here’s what this all means.

The Plutus Awards are the Oscars of the personal finance community. And Blog of the Year is the biggest of big deals. Winning it is like winning Best Picture. It’s the highest honor in our industry.

Well, maybe there are a handful of rarer, more coveted industry awards. Like the Hamilton B. Urglar Memorial Award for Excellence in Hamburglary. Or the Golden Vulva for Best Full-Body Vagina Costume. But honestly I think those are rigged. The same people win them year after year.

So for us, this is as good as it gets.

Our community

Piggy and I launched Bitches Get Riches in 2017. We were nominated for this award our very first year. Which… came as a huge shock. We didn’t know anyone was reading our blog—let alone with enough enthusiasm to nominate it for something. Also: there are awards?!

But it’s true. In the past we’ve won Best Blog for Women, Best Blog for Millennials & Gen Z, and Funniest Personal Finance Blog, with nominations for several others. We felt very content with our past wins. We were queens of the cool niches! So we were absolutely not expecting to win Blog of the Year.

Plutus Awards are pretty meaningful to us because the nominations come from within our professional community—a community that was unexpectedly, immediately welcoming to us.

We came in ready to be Molotov-hurling scene disrupters. But this amazing existing community of Non-Lame Personal Finance Folks was like “hell yeah, nice Mollies, care to join us for tea and criticizing the American healthcare system?”

No matter what your hobbies and passions are, it helps tremendously to have a community around you. Their encouragement and generosity have made us so much better at what we do.

A mission worth stanning

Let me tongue asshole for just a moment, s’il vous plaît.

In particular, Harlan Landes and the other folks at the Plutus Foundation have inspired and impressed us with their commitment to promoting diverse voices. They have thrown elbows to make space for women, people of color, queer people, and other marginalized groups. They fund very, very necessary projects for teaching financial literacy to underserved communities, like Bravely Go’s Talk Money to Me series.

Although I’m awfully pleased with our Blog of the Year Award, my greatest source of joy was hearing another of our nominations read aloud at the awards show. “The next nominee for the Best Current Events Content Related to Personal Finance Award is: Bitches Get Riches for The Biggest Threat to Black Wealth is White Terrorism.” Like, damn. It is so meaningful just to hear it said out loud.

(We rightly lost to Michelle Is Money Hungry’s A Candid Conversation About Race. Go read that right fucking now.)

It’s so much more meaningful to be recognized—in any capacity—by an institution that’s truly open to exploring the complicated messiness of deep conversations about money. It’s not the same old circle-jerk of techbros talking about how easy it is.

We would never be up for that award—and we wouldn’t want it anyway.

Have you met my dear friend, Imposter Syndrome?

Our Next Life… Rich and Regular… these past Blog of the Year winners are freaking legends. And we feel pretty small standing next to them.

Past winners of this award have, like, books n’ shit! They’ve appeared in documentaries, been talking heads on the news! They’ve written for The New York Times and Forbes and other sundry fancy newspapers with paywalls! They have glossy, nice-looking headshots on glossy, nice-looking websites that are definitely not personally administrated by the people in those headshots! They have teams! Not even teams, but like… staff!

Maybe that’s why this feels so unreal.

Piggy and I are just two idiots with a WordPress. If blogs were corporeal, ours would be covered in Cheeto dust.

We don’t promote ourselves. Traditionally, we just… sorta show up wherever we’re invited, ten minutes late and covered in pet hair?

We don’t have a sophisticated social media strategy. Our Instagrams are a start-stop stream of chicken photography.

We don’t do the whole SEO thing. Our content schedule is a fever dream text thread. No pipelines. No admins. Fuck that level of productivity and organization, we have video games from 2006 in urgent need of replaying! The following suggestive Patreon button is as hard of a sell as we’re gonna give anybody.

We just sorta do what we like. Which is mostly: be honest, be deep, and try to help people, but make it funny. That’s the closest thing to a mission statement we’ll ever have.

And I can’t attribute this win—of being the year’s best personal finance blog —to anything other than that, because it’s the only thing we do well. So that’s exactly what we’ll keep doing.

Thanks to all of you for being along for the ride.

Thank you. Just… thank you. Thank you.