An unfiltered look at building a business

Broke Millennial is officially 10 years old. It evolved from a hobby blog to a multi-part book series with a major publisher. I've gone from an underpaid PR girl to being my own boss.

Welcome to all the new readers who found Broke Millennial with Erin Lowry via

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! Wednesdays are typically my Ask Me Anything newsletter in which I answer a money question or two or respond to a financial trend or cliche. A few crowd favorites include: Who to trust with your money! (aka how to find a financial advisors), Should I keep investing or press pause?, Is your bank screwing you?, Should you trust finfluencers?, Investing (in my happiness)

However, on this particular Wednesday, I’m celebrating a massive milestone, so the newsletter is taking a different, retrospective direction. This is the (abridged) story of how I ended up here. 

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A decade. That’s how long I’ve been writing some iteration of Broke Millennial. Yesterday marked the 10-year anniversary of my inaugural blog post because all of this started on a free Wordpress site in 2013. I was 23 years old and creatively suffering. Well, in truth, I was just plain suffering. I was working what felt like a dead-end job in public relations that I hated and babysat on the side to try and keep financially afloat living in New York City. None of my stereotypical twenty-something-year-old dreams of moving to New York after college were playing out as I’d hoped. 

Then, after a late-night out, a friend’s confession inspired me. 

A fellow 23-year-old, at the time, this woman had moved to New York, like so many of us do, with creative aspirations and hoped to be an actress. We were sitting across from each other at a Greek restaurant in Astoria, Queens at about 1:30 in the morning when she started to bemoan the awfulness of her new job working as an executive assistant at a major media company. 

“Honestly, I don’t understand why you’re not pursuing acting,” I said. “You’re young, you don’t have kids, you’re not married, you don’t even have student loans, and worst case your parents could help you out if you needed it. Couldn’t you get a survival job that you could balance with going on auditions?” (And yes, dear reader, I’ve always been a deeply pragmatic person and did actually talk like this at 23.) 

“I don’t know,” she said on top of a deep exhale. “I worry about money. All I do is hope I have enough at the end of the month.” 

This statement was my lightbulb moment. 

Suddenly, I knew that feeling is what I wanted to explore. Broke Millennial was created for a generation coming of age during and shortly after the Great Recession. For everyone who felt tired, worn out, scared, and anxious about money. The fact that even entitled, privileged people with no student loans and a family safety net felt anxious about money illustrated just how critical and rich a topic personal finance was and is. 

Money interested me because of its taboo status while also being integral to our lives. To me, it wasn’t taboo because my parents did talk about and focused on financial education from a young age. What you grow up around is normal and it wasn’t until well into college that I started to realize how few people felt comfortable talking about money. 

My parents’ frankness around money informed so much of my young adulthood and made me feel in control, even when I was broke and taking home leftovers from work to stock my fridge. The feeling of being in control of money, even when you didn’t earn much, is what I wanted to share. Plus, I just wanted an opportunity to feel creative again. My day job zapped me of my life force and I felt like a shell of a person who craved a creative outlet, but I was too broke to invest in classes or clubs that cost much. Blogging, it seemed, was a cheap and easily accessible answer. 

Now, funnily enough, I’d never read a personal finance blog before launching Broke Millennial. I didn’t know there was a modest community of folks writing about money from their own perspectives and experiences. Instead, I came up with a clever moniker and just hit publish on Wordpress. Suddenly, folks found it and started commenting and I found an entire online community of people who were also obsessed with talking about a topic others found deeply uncomfortable. 

The origin of Broke Millennial was to hold myself accountable to learning more about money while also helping others through the stories I’d share. I’d never heard of brand partnerships or affiliate marketing or sponsored posts. I had no idea that people were fully living off of the revenue generated by their blogs. “Influencer” in its current iteration wasn’t even really a thing yet. 

Broke Millennial, the blog, eventually transitioned from Wordpress to BrokeMillennial.com and within a year or so it started to get some media attention. The accidental SEO of putting “Broke” and “Millennial” certainly helped, but I was also a fairly unique type in the field. A young, single woman living in a major city was not the common archetype of someone giving personal finance advice at the time. These days, there are so many voices from all walks of life, which makes it much easier for people to find someone who resonates with their lived experience. 

Suddenly, opportunities arose for me to give personal finance presentations at offices or be quoted in the press. I started to take advantage of any opportunity to leverage my blog as a means to get freelance writing jobs, including responding to journalists or editors who would share my posts on Twitter by saying, “Thank you! I’d love to write for (insert site here) if you have any opportunities.” This strategy led to my first significant freelance writing gig for the, now defunct, DailyFinance. 

The blog also became an interesting asset in job interviews, including one for a different public relations firm that focused on the finance industry. My writing had caught their eye and landed me the job interview, but the job offer came with a big string: I’d need to shutter the blog and stop freelancing. They felt it was a conflict of interest to write about personal finance in my spare time if a big bank was a client. Thankfully, I trusted my gut and said no. The pay increase was about the amount I was earning from freelance gigs thanks to Broke Millennial and I trusted that following the creative path would lead me to something bigger than trying to climb the ladder in PR, an industry I had absolutely no affinity towards. 

By the second anniversary of Broke Millennial, I’d switched from public relations to a job at a FinTech startup, which is where I really honed my craft and learned a lot about the world of banking. 

During this time, I started to get opportunities for on-air media segments and eventually ended up on CBS Sunday Morning. This moment truly changed my life. A literary agent saw me on the CBS Sunday Morning segment and reached out asking if I’d ever considered writing a book. 

Within a couple of months, I’d signed with the literary agent and written a book proposal. In January of 2016 we started to shop around the proposal and by February I had my first book deal for Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping by and Get Your Financial Life Together. A little more than a year later it hit shelves in May of 2017 and I was self-employed. 

For the last six years, I’ve been self-employed with a career that’s built off the brand I started for fun a decade ago. In that time, I’ve written three books and a workbook that’s publishing in May (almost exactly six years after my first book).

My income streams and revenue have varied wildly and included everything from freelance writing to keynote speaking engagements to brand partnerships. My life has changed drastically too. I’ve gotten married, adopted a couple dogs, moved around New York a few times and now live in Manhattan. 

But, to be abundantly clear, it wasn’t a seamless upward trajectory. I’ve suffered from horrible burn out, experienced depression, and spent a lot of the last two years learning how to detach my self-esteem and self-worth from my professional life. There’s a constant comparison trap of what others in the field (especially the TikTok Finfluencers) are doing to create massive brands and raking in tons of money.

Part of why I feel so passionately about not monetizing a hobby (or at least keeping some hobbies simply for fun) is because it’s easy to fall into a cycle in which you want to monetize absolutely everything. Or, as I wrote in a newsletter back in May 2022.

It’s a classic example of “do as I say, not as I do.” I’m sending this warning out into the universe because I know first hand, once monetized, a relaxing, fun hobby can and will become a stressor. You’re now accountable to other people (aka customers or clients). You’re on deadlines. This is no longer an activity to just do on your down time at your own pace. Once you monetize a hobby, it starts to feel like a job/side hustle and then you need to find another hobby for a stress release.

Monetizing hobbies and Robo-advisors

Broke Millennial started as a hobby and I’m eternally grateful it turned into a career, but life is long and I’m fully aware that I won’t be “Broke Millennial” forever. There is no clear career path for me. It’s certainly something that gnaws at the back of my brain and worries me about the future. Of course, there are many advantages to the life I’ve built for myself, but I never want to leave people with the strictly filtered version. 

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a career that produces a paycheck and a linear path forward and your hobbies are simply your hobbies. There seems to be a lot of pressure, at least in American society, to be entrepreneurial and to be your own boss. For all the digital nomad life you see on Instagram and TikTok, few people talk about the stress of handling all elements of a business (or having to hire staff to cover those elements), of the increase in taxes you pay without a company covering part of Social Security and Medicare, of the isolation it’s easy to feel if you work solely for yourself, of the anxiety about income swings and never being entirely sure how much you’re going to earn year-over-year. It’s more than okay to stick with your day job. 

But, if you have questions about taking the leap, feel free to leave them in the comments! 

Thank you for the part you’ve played in helping Broke Millennial reach a decade. Whether you’re an original reader of the blog and transitioned to the books or if you just found me last week, I appreciate you giving me your time, attention, and – for some of you – your hard-earned money to support my work. 

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If you’re interested in financially supporting my work, here are a few options: 

• Become a paid subscriber of this newsletter ($5 per month) 

• Buy one of the books in the Broke Millennial series (or request your local library get the series if it’s not on the shelves!):

  • Broke Millennial

  • Broke Millennial Takes On Investing

  • Broke Millennial Talks Money: Scripts, Stories, and Advice to Navigate Awkward Financial Conversations (majorly discounted to $9.30 and my personal favorite!)
    

• Pre-order the Broke Millennial Workbook

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