We Want YOU To Become a Patron of the Bitches

Piggy and I launched this blog in January of 2017. The level of positive engagement we’ve received in only eight months is completely shocking to us.

We’ve received a number of site comments, social media shares, and private messages with folks thanking us. According to these beautiful people, our little blog has pushed them to ask for raises, encouraged them to seek new jobs, inspired them to refocus their finances, and absolved them of unnecessary self-flagellation.

And guys, that makes us feel really, really, really, really fucking good.

As we’ve stated before, the reason we run this site is to help. Bad, outdated, irrelevant, damaging financial advice is everywhere. Seeing it—and knowing that many people must fall for it—makes our actual hearts turn into cartoon hearts that break along perfectly triangular jagged edges.

Knowing there are good people out there getting tricked, swindled, guilted, ripped-off, shamed, and drained makes cartoon steam come out of our ears. (The cartoon steam gives us actual second-degree burns. Please send Neosporin.)

For this reason, we’ve never had a plan to monetize the site. The easiest ways to do so just didn’t sit right with us. Sponsored content disguised as our own words… product reviews and advertisements for stuff you likely do not need… irritatingly pervasive pop-ups and click-to-exit ads. We get offers in our inbox to do this stuff every day. And we reject them all because they go against our core mission.

But now we’ve run into a problem.

We’ve gotten too popular for our own good.

Here’s what’s up

If you tried to visit the site late last Wednesday, you would’ve seen a blank error page. We exceeded our bandwidth! A few too many of you blessed, thirsty-minded creatures visited our site and soaked up our wisdom with your eyeballs as dry as the Gobi. And we had to fork over a credit card to our hosting provider before they’d turn us back on. At an increased rate, naturally.

We were willing to eat the cost of hosting when we began—but that cost has doubled. And at our rate of growth, we can probably expect for it to double again before the year is out.

So here is our ask of you

If you have enjoyed this site and you are in a financial position to do so, please become a patron of our work on Patreon.

You’ve probably heard of Patreon before, but if not: it’s a way for fans to crowd-source the creation of the content they love. You pledge an amount that you can afford, and even if it’s tiny, it gains strength by pooling together with the tiny pledges of others on Patreon. You’ll also get access to exclusive stuff, which is detailed in our Patreon rewards page. And in exchange, we get a small, predictable trickle of money to invest back into the site’s maintenance.

Important caveat ahead!

We don’t want a single red cent from anyone who is in a financially perilous position. (And if you live in a country that has lowest-value coinage of some color other than red, we do not want whatever color of coin that is either.)

If you’re still living in your emotionally abusive parents’ house, or you’re crying in the bathtub over a minimum-wage job you detest, for fuck’s sake: you don’t have to give us anything.

We work hard to write articles with pertinent advice for lower- and lower-middle class folks because we were/are those folks, and those are the people who need relevant advice the most. We also recognize that those people aren’t necessarily in a position to subsidize our writing. So be it.

But if you’re one of the lucky ones who has an extra $1 or $5 or $10 left over at the end of each month, we humbly ask you to consider pledging it to our cause. Your donation will help us reach hundreds of people who aren’t lucky enough to be in your position yet.

Here’s what you get out of our Patreon

In exchange for your donation:

We promise to continue our mission to be Friends Who You Can Count On to Know Everything About Money and Sundry Other Grown-Up Stuff, or FWYCCOTKEAMASOGUS. And we want to be a presence in our readers’ lives that inspires them and leads them right. We will try our very best to give our readers advice that empowers them instead of shaming them. And we will use a strategic combination of tormented metaphors, barely-related gifs, and very small words to get through the boring stuff.

We promise that as long as our site’s bills get paid, we will not accept sponsored content or advertising of any kind. No sneaky hidden links, no undisclosed guest posts, no paid content of any kind. That’s how you know that when we recommend something, we do so with pure intentions.

We promise to make the best possible use of your generosity.

We promise that any money we make above our barest site maintenance costs will be invested back into the site’s mission. If any happy overages occur, we will explore pushing into other mediums to reach a broader audience.

We promise to be the Daena Targaryen and Elaena Targaryen of historical Targaryen rulers.

We promise to educate you on what the hell that last sentence meant. (Basically: we will be financial geniuses who defy traditional patriarchal systems and strike boldly off in their own direction, damn the consequences. Stick with us, kid. We’ll school you on Westerosi history from the Dawn Age to the Second Long Night. You’ll have your copper Maester’s link in history and your yellow-gold link in economics in no time.)

Now please visit our Patreon. Shut us up with sweet funding before we summon up more irrelevant fantasy histories with which to irritate and alienate you!