The thing I am most grateful for this year is that this wonderful OMD community formed online! I can’t believe how amazing this place is - such generous and awesome people from all over the world, sharing their outfits, their pets, their gardens, their Feels - and even, cough sometimes - finances.
This community has meant so much to me personally, and I know that it has helped my budget and my mental health immeasurably. I even got to meet several forum members on the other side of the world (thank you Aussie OMD crew!)
I’m going to keep providing this forum for as long as people want it, but it doesn’t come totally free to pay server costs. Everything to keep this forum running - which gets over 230,000 pageviews a month - comes from our Purrsonal Finance Society Members, the people you see with “patron” badges around the forums.
If you benefit from the forums, it can really help if you can throw us a few dollars each month (if it’s in your budget) to help.
A really fabulous anonymous patron has agreed to match every new patron that joins the Purrsonal Finance Society through January 15th. So if you’ve been considering joining, this is the purr-fect time to do it - as your monthly pledge will be DOUBLED.
We have already raised $44 new monthly donations during this campaign - the cost of two months of server costs.
We are just a few patrons away from hitting 100 per month!
Patrons get:
- A set of cute cat stickers mailed to you for joining the Purrsonal Finance Society, with a handwritten note from me
- A thank you shoutout on the podcast for joining
- The special “patron” badge
- Warm fuzzies of help offsetting our server costs and supporting our programs like the Pay It Fur-ward workshops with homeless and transitional youth!
In case you were wondering, these are the general monthly overhead expenses for OMD: ~$298
- Virtual private server hosting costs for the forum (to keep it fast!): $22
- Mailgun server (for forum notification emails) and convertkit (for mass mailings): $34
- Cloud backup + photo hosting for forums: $8
- Stickers Printing + Mailing for monthly forum budget challenges: ~$20-35
- Transcription service for podcasts: ~$20
- Adobe Creative Cloud software (designing icons, stickers, etc): $29
- Paying our freelance audio engineer and (soon to be) editor: $150
OMD earns about $100-250/month off of radio syndicate fees and digitally inserted ads on the podcast. That means this is truly essential for the show and the forums to have some community support to break even each month. We’ve been very lucky we’ve been breaking even for the past 15 months on the show thanks to listener support on patreon.
Why not ads?
While we have been invited to a few ad networks for the forums, most of them would be big, gross-looking ads and might significantly impact performance time of the forums. I haven’t yet be offered an ad network that isn’t giant photo or video ads. And all and all, those wouldn’t bring in too much money. If we can keep up patron support, there’s no reason to get ads on the forums at all.
What else are you gonna do with the money?
One big goal for 2019 was to start paying some freelancers to write blog posts for OMD and take up some of the reigns for diverse financial content when The Billfold closed. We never quite got to the financial point to do that last year, but in 2020 I would love to get there! Patreon will help immensely with paying freelancers (I don’t want anyone writing for free around here!)
What if I can’t?
Absolutely no worries, or pressure! Most people won’t be able to to give - we have over 1,000 regular daily forum users, and only 81 patrons. I know it’s not in everyone’s budget or priorities!
What if I don’t want to give monthly or use patreon but want to contribute?
No worries! You can buy some stickers, a mug, or a book to gift to someone, or donate one-time gifts via paypal. It really helps!
