Behind the Curtain

I'M RELUCTANT TO ADMIT that HumbleDollar is run using smoke and mirrors. But if someone said that, I’d be hard-pressed to disagree.

I’ve long believed that the principles of sound money management are pretty timeless. What you should be doing with your money this year isn’t a whole lot different from what you should have been doing last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

This notion is baked into how much of the site operates. Ignore the Forum and the latest articles, and consider the two other key elements of the homepage, the Get Educated and Second Look sections. Both these parts of the site run on autopilot, or close to it, and it’s a key reason I’m hoping the site can continue to thrive after I succumb to cancer.

By setting up much of the homepage to run on autopilot, it’s freed me up in recent years to focus on editing and writing articles, while also continuing to add ever-greater depth to other parts of the site. One result: I like to think HumbleDollar offers a richness of content that’s found on few other personal-finance websites.

Second Look. At any given time, this section offers a selection of five articles that were first published at least 30 days earlier. Some of these articles go back as far as 2014, when I was blogging at JonathanClements.com, before HumbleDollar’s year-end 2016 launch. The five articles displayed are automatically refreshed every two hours. Over the past decade, HumbleDollar has published more than 3,500 articles and blog posts.

Get Educated. In this section, you’ll find features dubbed Act, Humans, Manifesto, Money Guide, Think and Truths. All these features are published on an annual cycle, as is the punchy one- or two-sentence insight that appears at the top of the homepage.

I like to think that, if folks peruse the Get Educated section every day for a year, they’ll get a great personal-finance education—and, if they keep reading the section year after year, they’ll be reminded of some of the key financial insights that we often forget amid the turmoil of the financial markets and everyday life.

One issue with all this: Some of these pieces need revising each year depending on, say, the latest tax thresholds or retirement account contribution limits. In the months ahead, I’ll endeavor to make the site more timeless and hence reduce the need for such updating. Still, I worry that, after my death, parts of the site will become outdated if, say, we get major changes in Social Security, Medicare or the tax law.

This is especially an issue with the site’s money guide. My hope: In the years after I shuffle off this mortal coil, readers will use the comment section below each money guide section to offer updates. In addition, I'm working with folks at another website, with an eye to having them periodically update HumbleDollar's money guide.

Jonathan Clements is the founder and editor of HumbleDollar. Follow him on X @ClementsMoney and on Facebook, and check out his earlier articles.

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