Favorite 5, out of the 63 blogs that we read!!

Just 13 more days to go before we kick-off our sabbatical. There is a growing flutter in our stomach as the date approaches 🙂 🙂 Though our life has been very busy with Vivek’s office, packing/ selling stuff and planning 5 months sabbatical, but we are already in sabbatical mood 🙂 We are way more productive these days and have a lot more drive to do things. Because of all this excitement, Vivek gets up very early in the morning and that too without an alarm – Getting up early gives Vivek more number of hours to relish the sabbatical euphoria. We are utilizing this extra time and energy to identify new goals in life – Koshika recently got Zumba instructor license and is about to start offering Zumba classes.

Vivek has joined a mastermind group consisting of entrepreneurs (Expect a separate post on this soon!), has started regular meditation sessions through Headspace app and is preparing for a 5K race. He is also planning to experiment with toastmaster sessions and to attend the introduction session of Rising Tide Capital (Community Business Academy)!!!

With so many interesting things going on, our life is definitely on a roll. But among all these, there is one thing that is closest to Vivek’s heart, something that he yearns to do whole day and is kind of a meditation to him… Any guesses? You are absolutely right – that is Blog reading!!! You win a prize for answering such a tough question correctly! 🙂

His feedly has 63 blogs, and there have been days when he has even spent 8 hours a day reading blogs – What an addiction 🙂 He has read all the posts in Afford Anything, MMM and Mukam blogs. If you see his feed, he is mostly into Travel, Finance and early retirement.

Our feedly screenshot

Why Vivek loves reading blogs so much? First and foremost, the learning that he gets from these blogs is tremendous. Whenever he learns anything new, he makes a note in one of the several mind maps that he has created (To know more about Mind Maps , click here!). Secondly, he relishes the personal touch that the bloggers have in their posts, and last but not the least – Vivek gets to see how each blogger has different perspective towards life. 

Our Mind Maps folder structure

Inside one of the folder structure

One of the mind maps

Vivek keeps churning his blog feeds and if a blog has been a part of his feed for a long time it, in itself, proves that the blog is of very high quality! As anyone can guess, choosing best 5 out of these 63 blogs was a very tough exercise for Vivek. The yardstick that Vivek used to shortlist these 5 blogs (well, you might find it a little amusing, but this is what it is…)- A big smile on Vivek’s face whenever there is a new post published on these blogs. Reading the new post, then, becomes the top priority work for him.

So here goes the list: (The blogs are not listed in any specific order)

1. Root of good (Category: Early retirement) – Justin is very transparent and has all the numbers on his blog – Monthly expenses, net worth etc. His posts are easy to read, entertaining and has plethora of information. We eagerly wait for his posts to know more about his post-FI adventures! We have been reading this blog since last 2 years.
2. MMM (Category: Early retirement/Financial independence) – He is the godfather of personal finance arena. If you haven’t read him till now, leave everything and read him first. I recommend that you should read all his posts from post #1. You will gain invaluable knowledge. You will find all the gurus of personal finance contributing in the valuable discussions taking place in the comments section of the post and forums. The forums on this blog are one of the most active forums that you will find anywhere on the internet. We have been reading this blog since last 2 years.
3. Mad Fientist (Category: Finance/Early retirement) – He has very limited number of posts, but all his posts are sensational. Want legal ways to save tax? This blog should be your go-to source. We have been reading this blog since last 1 year.
4. Mike and Lauren (Category: Early retirement) – Again, great content, but what makes this blog unique is the medium of delivery. They publish very well-created 5-minute videos which are chock-full of useful information delivered in an engaging way through the video. We envision our blog to have more video posts like theirs and fewer number of text posts. Creating videos would be so much faster than typing such long posts and from the readers’ perspective too, videos would be much more engaging and faster to comprehend.We have been reading this blog since last  6 months.
5. Breathedreamgo (Category: Travel) – She is a Canadian who visits India very often. The blog mostly covers places in India. She writes in such a detail about the place that you almost feel that you are in the place with her.She mostly covers unique places that we end up adding in our must-visit list 🙂 We have been reading this blog since last 6 months

We plan to do a similar post 6 months down the line and it will be interesting to see if the sabbatical has changed our interests and if we are following very different blogs from what we are now!!