We're sorry our site sucked

We burned it to the ground. PeteThePlanner.com has been a thing for about nine years or so. It’s always consisted of a blog, a few tips, a book store filled with snarkily written financial books, and a handful of pictures of me. We burned it to the ground.

It’s not that people weren’t visiting our site. In fact, they were. But we figured-out that we weren’t holding up our end of the bargain. Let’s say you are fresh off a divorce, you find your way onto our site, and then what? It’s a trial and error click-fest until you find something that might help you. Or what if you are a pre-retiree finally admitting that you have done jack squat about your retirement? I guess you could pop into our bookstore and buy Mock Retirement. But what if you need direction now?

I’ve always said that I’m not interested in forcing someone to buy something from me in order to get a straight answer. I pride myself on giving you non-depends answers, especially when we can eliminate the “it depends if you buy my books” depends. Go ahead, buy one of my books if you are so moved, but up until that point, I’m committed to answer all of your questions anyway.

That’s why we burned it to the ground. And that’s why we rebuilt the sucker from scratch. You’ll notice a few things when you head to our site now. First, giant pictures of me. I’m not gonna lie to you. There are giant pictures of me. It wasn’t exactly our intention. It just kinda happened. Sorry about that. But if you squint, I look like a young Ron Howard.

Next, you’ll notice that we are now an answers based site. When I visit a website, I usually go to the site to answer some sort of question. Every time you click on a page or link on our site, you will get the answer you are looking for. If you don’t, email us and we’ll fix it. Each one of us only has only so much time and energy to focus on our financial lives, and getting caught in an internet goose chase is counterproductive. Our site is now goose chase free.

Not to tell you how to use the internet, but when you visit our site, I encourage you to start with the Need help? tab. From that point, we will let you know what you need to know about whatever stage of life you’re in. Need further assistance from there? Then just click the Contact tab or email us using the email address which is at the very top of our site.

Our company has changed significantly over the years. But our mission has been the same since 2002: Help as many people as possible fix their financial lives. Our mission led us to sell our financial planning practice in 2012, and focus on serving hundreds of thousands of people, versus hundreds of people. Yet, we’ve just scratched the surface.

The reason I wrote the Your Money Life series is because I felt like financial advice shouldn’t be one size fits most. Each book breaks-down a decade of our financial lives, and then tells you everything you need to know about saving, investing, budgeting, debt, insurance, and spending, in that decade. The writing process for these books was beyond enlightening. I had never before considered how different our 20s are from our 30s, or how different our 40s are from our 50s. The true differences are nothing short of shocking.

And now for a quick look of what's ahead. Later in 2015, all of our curriculum, books, and presentations will be available on an eLearning platform. Our eLearning modules will be comprehensive yet causal. They will be important yet light. They will be powerful yet palatable.

One last note. We’ve added to our mission. We now want to redefine what it means to give a damn about money. Our lives shouldn’t be defined by money. But they are, when we make less-than-ideal choices. Caring about your financial life, and making proper choices, doesn’t have to be tedious. It can be productive and fun. And that’s why we burned our site to the ground.