HowToSaveMoney.ca Is Joining The Yakezie Challenge!

What better way to launch into the New Year than joining Yakezie! Wait, what is the Yakezie Challenge anyway? I’m so glad you asked!

Yakezie is a group of personal finance and lifestyle websites that have banded together to help promote one another and increase their overall web presence. The thinking is that by working together we can achieve much more and have a much bigger impact than we ever could by ourselves! I’ve been monitoring the activity of the network through the Yakezie homepage as well as visiting the sites of many Yakezie members for months now and so far I’ve been extremely impressed with both the program and its members. I always see them selflessly helping each other and their readers so I honestly can’t wait for HTSM to join their ranks as a full-fledged member.

The Yakezie Challenge, created by Sam of Financial Samurai, is the 6 month process that everyone who wishes to join Yakezie needs to go through in order to be initiated. It includes:

• Writing new content consistently 2-4 times per week.
• Selflessly promoting other members and challengers of Yakezie.
• Installing the Yakezie badge on the front page of HowToSaveMoney.ca.
• Monitoring my growth using the Alexa website ranking system.
• Making this announcement about joining the challenge!

The hardest part for me is definitely going to be posting 2-4 times a week. I am a notoriously slow writer and I tend to write very lengthy and involved posts that are heavily researched and are more like how to manuals than light, airy, or humorous blog posts. However, I’m going to give it my best shot and hopefully this challenge will help me push through and keep generating great content that will help you, my readers, save as much money as possible!

Every Story Has A Beginning

Part of the challenge is attempting to crack the top 200,000 websites in the world as ranked by Alexa. This is going to be a bit more difficult for HowToSaveMoney.ca because our content is almost exclusively targeted towards Canadians, which is obviously a much smaller population than the United States and the rest of the world! That’s ok though because there is nothing like a good challenge and I’m sure our American readers can extrapolate the things that they read here to their own situations as well! So if you aren’t Canadian, please stick around anyway and I’m sure you will find some gold nuggets hidden amongst the rest.

And so begins the challenge! HowToSaveMoney.ca is currently ranked #1,721,997 globally and #37,434 in Canada. My goal is to actually crack the top 200,000 globally by the time 6 months rolls around and, more importantly, to make it into the top 5,000 in Canada in that same period. These goals definitely seem hard to achieve, especially the latter, but anything is possible and I am going to give it my all!

Let’s Start By Promoting Others

HowToSaveMoney.ca only paints a very small part of the personal finance picture. Our focus is to teach you to save money on the things you buy and do everyday through unconventional means without ever needing to cut back your lifestyle. That automatically excludes most frugal tips, investing strategies, ways to earn more money, sustainable green living, insurance planning, tax tips, and so on. These other things are also very important to overall financial health so I will be highlighting good articles I encounter from around the Yakezie network and elsewhere to give you a look at the bigger picture. I will also be extending invitations for others to guest post giving you access to some of that excellent content right here on HowToSaveMoney.ca.

So without further ado, here are some great sites for you to check out:

Canadian Yakezie Members:

• Young And Thrifty – My favourite Canadian personal finance blog! I read her site daily and she always has fresh content and a unique perspective on finances and life. Her relaxed and inviting writing style is something that I’m sure you will enjoy!
• Sustainable Personal Finance – A husband and wife team that write both about finances and sustainable green living. Learn how to better manage your finances while being mindful of the environment and those around you.
• RealizedReturns – A young professional (engineer) looking to increase his wealth and learn more about personal finances along the way.
• Finance Fox – A jack of all trades into marketing, information technology, investing, and frugality. You are bound to find many unique ideas here that meld together a lot of different disciplines.
• The Passive Income Earner – A Vancouverite chronicling their journey to earning enough passive income to comfortably live on during retirement.
• The Financial Blogger – Mike not only talks about personal finance as most personal finance bloggers do, but he also focuses heavily on teaching you how to run a blog and make money online.
• CanadianFinanceBlog – A financial analyst hailing from Edmonton that has a passion for learning and finances. There are also two regular guest posters to the site so you can expect a diverse set of topics from different perspectives.
• Money Rabbit – A young 23 year old Torontonian woman with a dream of being a net worth millionaire by the time she turns 30!
• Prairie EcoThrifter – A prairie girl who is passionate about green living and speaks from experience having lived a green and thrifty life for more than 3 years after she grew tired of making endless impulse buys and never having time to use all of her stuff.
• Invest It Wisely – Kevin is a recent graduate and software developer that found himself in significant consumer debt and has been rapidly learning about money management and finances to put himself back in the green.

Other Great Yakezie Reads:

• Financial Samurai – The founder of Yakezie and a very entertaining blog that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Sam lives the high life and is always full of wit and humour. Never a dull moment here!
• Frugal Confessions – A girl after my own heart. She is frugal so she has more money left over to enjoy the finer things in life and to experience all that life has to offer. The less you spend on one thing, the more you have left to spend on amazing life experiences!
• Dealerity – Chris is focused on budgeting and reducing expenses and, for him, it all began with a fight with his cable company. That is something I can definitely relate to because I fight with the phone company all the time! He posts rather infrequently but he writes very detailed and informative articles that are very useful and worth the wait.
• Wealth Informatics – Tired of living paycheque to paycheque even when having a good job, Suba decided to learn about finances and turn her life around. She shares tips and information she has learned along the way to help her readers do the same.
• CoupleMoney – Exploring finances as it relates to life as a married couple.
• Yes, I Am Cheap – It took some time, but Sandy finally admitted she is cheap and now unashamedly talks about it on her blog as she attempts to dig her way out of some serious debt in the expensive city of New York.
• Money Cone – Frustrated at the number of people paying a “stupid tax” everyday due to a lack of fundamental financial knowledge, Money Cone was launched to answer basic questions about money that everyone should know.

More Canadian Sites I Love:

• Deals And Coupons:
  • RedFlagDeals
  • SmartCanucks
  • Grocery Alerts
  • Canadian Daily Deals
  • Simply Frugal
  • Deal Guild
  • PriceNetwork
  • Bargain Moose
• Personal Finance:
  • Million Dollar Journey
  • Fabulously Broke
  • Money Smarts Blog
  • Financial Highway
  • Squawkfox

I hope this new year is happy and prosperous for each one of you! At the very least you will have more money left in your bank account from visiting HowToSaveMoney.ca every day in 2011!