I’m a fan of financial transparency, so here’s a look at our actual expenses to run Personal Finance Club during 2021. We use Quickbooks to do our bookkeeping and track our expenses. These numbers were exported directly from Quickbooks and I summarized the categories and made it a little prettier for easy Instagram consumption.

We try to spend 98% of our effort creating and sharing free content to help everyone learn! Our only source of revenue is a single course on building wealth using index funds that sells for $79.

It’s interesting that all of our actual costs to run our website, course and technology are almost rounding error and fall into the “other” categories. This is things like our website hosting, course hosting, software subscriptions (like Quickbooks), and even attending a few conferences. We’re lucky that unlike selling physical goods, selling an online course is almost entirely profit. That allows us to donate 20% of sales and still support our payroll!

If you ever start a business, it’s important to think about what your profit margins will be. Whenever I have a friend come to me excited because they want to open their own gym, I just groan because I’ve done the math and it’s brutal. There are so many big fixed costs and you need a lot of time and a lot of members just to become break even profitable, much less pay yourself. And even then there’s pretty limited upside because you can’t suddenly have 100X members of a physical gym in the way you could with an online business.

Do you have any questions about our business or startups in general? I’ve started a few companies and I’ll work on doing more entrepreneurship content along with the good ol’ investing early and often. (Fun fact: I sold my first company for $5M but I’ve actually made more from investing since then!)

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Jeremy

via Instagram