HerMoney Classic: How Kyle Taylor Made Millions Saving Pennies
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So the episode you're about to listen to was recorded a while back when I was living in a new recording our show out of a studio in health kitchen. Since then, so many things have changed that I moved to fill IT up here. Her money no longer has an office I record from the comfort of home.

But i'm bringing back this incredibly popular episode with kill tail of the penny order, because when kill started the penny order, he was in fifty thousand dollars worth of credit card dead. And he used a blog and a series of side hustles to help him climb his way out and eventually build a business that keep is able to sell for one hundred million dollars. Here's my conversation with kill Taylor. welcome. kill.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here. So back IT up and tell us, how did you get from this idea of trying to solve your own problem to transforming IT to this thriving enterprise?

Very much an accident. Yes, they are. I feel very blessing that way.

Yeah, I did not start the penny holder with. The idea of this is gonna be some huge media company. This was a way for me to hold myself accountable. So as you mentioned, I had more than fifty thousand dollars in student loan and credit ard dad and no college degree. You about the way so .

many people these days, right? You get on the four year plan and the five year plan and the sixty year plan, and then all of the sudden you're out with no degree and .

a mountain of debt. And and I have contributed to the problems myself by making all kinds of really poor financial decisions and overspending. And so I found myself with this bucket of dead feeling, very lost, very rock bottom, and thought, i'm not getting out of this on my own. I need something to hold myself accountable before IT. And that's really how this was born.

You know, it's interesting. I publish a book called the age proof with a doctor aiming to help people change both their financial behavior and their health related behavior to get themselves on the right track. And one of the tenants in the book is having an accountability body, you know, having somebody else who can hold your hand, keep you accountable and not tell you you're doing the right thing when you're actually doing the wrong thing. And that sounds like that's exactly what this site became for you.

The internet became my accountability body.

A lot of friendly and not so friendly accountability buff. So as you started, this was IT hard to get honest.

absolutely. Because I had spent a nearly a decade on my own sort of lying to myself you know I grew up in a family where personal finance was out on the table. We talked about IT a lot. We had a family budget uh, from the age of like five or six. We know how much our parents made um and we knew how much money was in each category and my mom would chAllenge us uh to help contribute to that.

So one of my favorite examples, this is we are trying to get the electric bill down and he made a chart and how us kids go measure on the side of the house the meter each day, and then chAllenge us to see if we could get that even lower the next day. So I grew up with that, but as soon as I got on my own, I guess, like a lot of eighteen years old, I quickly forgot out about everything I learned and went the opposite way, started buying things I couldn't afford, signing up for classes that I wouldn't go to, and starting jobs only to quit them a few months later, or starting temporary jobs that didn't have a real future, my real future for me. So I made all those really bad decisions, and many times I had to go to the mom and dad, well, to sort bail me out, did they? They did.

They are. My parents have always been great. But every time you do IT IT gets a little harder. Um not only is IT more frustrating for them, they order you get by. IT started to really hurt my own self confidence to have to keep asking mommy and dad to pay rent.

So what was the thing that tipped you into thinking? I am just not gonna ask anymore when to do this on my own, and i'm gonna do IT in a very public way.

So I remember asking my dad for rent money once, and course he will obliged an any sent. Listen, we've done this a few times, and if we're going to do this again, we need you to be honest with how much debt you have. And so my parents let me get all the bills out.

And we figured out, and only the first time I had realized that total, I ve got ten up to fifty thousand dollars. And so after I came with that realization a few months later, I got hired on A A storm political campaigns, and I got on a new job and was back in the boat again. I had run out of money, and I was waiting for my first check.

I was lucky they were putting me up in a little efficiency, but I didn't have any money to buy food. And I remembred that call that are that chat I had with my parents. And I said, never again. And I thought, I just can't go ask. I can't ask one time. And, you know, I only had to get through two weeks of, really, I would look for a change on the side of the road by one and anything I could, but I just was so defeated I couldn't ask again. And that was really my rock bottle moment.

So how did you launch and tell us what you did that other people can do to straight themselves out? yeah.

So once I mentioned, IT really started as a heavy. And in fact, I was so broke I couldn't even afford a doma name. So I started at the penny holder dot blog spot.

And what I did is I I realized that so much of what I had been focusing on was figuring out ways to save money, things to cut back on, and that's extremely important. IT is. But I also wasn't bringing enough money to pay off fifty thousand dollars in debt.

So I needed to figure out ways to grow my income. And that became the father for the blog. I would talk about the side jobs I was doing on the weekend at night. And not only was IT my content, but IT was, is the money I used to pay that that credit dead off .

some of those side jobs. And and we live in a world now where, I mean, I think everybody needs sight jobs when I started, and I ve told this story before, but when I started working in new york and got myself into some credit card trouble, I got a side job teaching S A S. You know, and that side job, very quickly paid more than my day job paid. IT wasn't gonna take me where I wanted to go, but IT was great. The people on my team have had side jobs as they've started working, is very hard to live in a big city without job IT IT is.

And who knows, your side job may end up becoming .

your business so well. Your side jobs, you are a movie preview auditor. You a beer auditor. What is a beer auditor?

Do beer author is the first time this skinny kid ever found any popularity? Because what I got paid to do go to grocery stories and gas stations and see if they would check my ID when I purchased the beer or wine. And because I was an undercover audit, I couldn't reveal myself and I had to make a purchase. Um so I I would end up with sometimes twenty five thirty packs of beer bottles, wine every single day and then I I got page write a small report if like ten questions about what my experience was at the store. And that was one of the the first jobs that I wrote about on the site.

Well, you don't look all enough. I'm sorry to buy beer now.

H, I will take that gene. You, thank you.

I always get so happy. You know, there are those bars now where they check everybody's ID right? I get very happy in those bars because i'm like, okay, you can check my idea.

I know that I don't. I did look Young enough to get carded for a long time. I'm no longer there.

but i'm gonna ld on to IT as long as I, I, I found that the airline is getting further back already.

you've come up with a lot of different tools that you used. Keep yourself on track now that even though you've now built this successful business, one of them I know is financial sunday. Yeah what's financial sunday?

I am a recovering spender and I will forever ver be a recovering spender. So it's important to me to have these little checkers with myself because I think it's similar to any others sort of addiction where you're where you deal with that the rest of your life.

So what worked for me with financial sundays, where I had made IT a pleasurable thing, I SAT down on the glass of one, a good meal, and I reviewed my spending from the week prior and then assessed whether I needed to make any edits or changes smangle for upcoming week. Do still do IT. I do.

So it's become more of a of a project than anything. Now, lucky I have much more to to manage. And I also have a business to manage. So not in addition to my weekly checkpoint s. Now I have quarter checkers with an account can make sure on the right .

track and making sure that you're putting a side .

after pay taxes.

I want to come back to the growth of your business. Second, we're talking with kill Taylor, his blog, his website, his enterprise, his business is the penny horder dot com. We're going to talk about how you build a blog, how you monetize a blog.

But before we do that, we're gonna take a quick break. Her money is proudly sponsored by admin financial engines. The end of the years, a great time, depose and review your progress towards your retirement goals. Whether your retirement is a few decades away or right around the corner, you need a plan for your money to help make sure you have enough saved and invested to do and see and experience what you want most. It's time to make sure that your money is working for you and to give yourself the piece of mind that your retirement income can last as long as you do.

And now is an especially good time because element financial engines is running a special offer schedule, a free retirement review with a wealth planner, and they'll also give you a financial plan made just for you to get started. Go to plan E F E dot com. This offer expires december thirteen s so don't miss out. Schedule yours today.

Can Taylor is the C. E. O and founder of the penny order. Many people have an idea. They just start a blog as a hobby, which is basically what you did. So when did you realize that the penny hotter had more potential than just being a hobby .

about two years? And two things happened almost at the same time when I get contacted by an editor at Opera a com, and they asked me for some tips about making extra money.

And I I think at this point, I only thought my mom was reading the blog like secretly so to have somebody like that reach out to me at gush, maybe this has more legs and then I started to get letters um shortly after that from people who said, hey, thanks for sharing your beer auditing job. I just got the same job in my city. That is the coolest thing that was really fulfilling to me, that by sharing my own experiences, I could have some small part in helping somebody else.

How did you scale?

Yes, getting a blog is not easy, and I feel like there are so many of these websites and courses out there right now that sort of make you think blogging can be something you go zero to a million dollars. IT took me two years before I made enough money in a month to pay my rent. So IT was two years of nearly working for free.

I think that's important if you're going to think about starting a blog. One of the most important things I did though was I connected with other bloggers. So in the finance world, we have a thin con.

which is the financial bloggers convention.

exactly. And he was such a great way for me to meet other people who are doing what I was doing. And as you know, a big part of building website is getting other people to talk about you and link to you.

That's important for an S, C. O perspective. So by making real friends, I started to find some online friends who could help me out.

You started in two thousand and ten. When did you hire people? How did you fill this blog with enough content to make IT interesting enough for people to come back to everyday?

So I wrote on my own for four years, and then I started trying a couple of free answers out. And I was struggling to find going from a single author and multi author blog is difficult. And I just through googling, I google blog management, and I found this company called social access that had a team of free answers to create content.

And most of the free answers were similar to me, and that they were Young and had dead, were all doing all these side. Giggs and IT turned into a perfect relationship, where for the next year, they started contributing to the and then I didn't hire my first employee until twenty months ago. wow.

And now you have sixty five. That's inca. It's pretty insane. Very excited.

And you've been very successful with affiliate, right? So explain what an affiliate is and how that works.

Yeah so another word we call performance marketing where we partner with a brand and some general meals as one of our partners and they want to help distributing coupons and recipes about general meals products to help people save money. Perfectly aligned to IT you're .

trying to .

do on our site. And so we write about the offers, we create videos and the general meals. Every person who cups a coupon or signs up pays us on a performance basis rather than a page you basis.

One of the things that I think is interesting about the penny order and I pay attention, is you've got a lot of interesting ideas. There are a lot of interesting, oh, I could try that kind of pieces of content. So as you think back over the last few months of content, what are the most fun tips and tricks that you have for listeners to her money? Because I actually think we share a lot of sensibility.

yeah. So one of our goals with content on the penny water is to make all of our news actionable. So there is something, there is a little homework at every post that can help you get ahead.

And we share interesting jobs, work from home jobs, stories about people who have paid off that. But some of my personal favorite counts, and obviously, because it's where I started, is about side gigs. And we've had some fun ones.

We did a story a few months ago. One of our contributors has a cricket farm in his backyard, and he sells those crickets to the local pet store, and he's made over ten thousand dollars. They're not in this, hopefully something for .

everybody on the absolutely, well, this is fun. It's nice to meet you in person.

Thank you so much pleasure.

Thanks so much for joining me today on her money. If you love the episode, please give us a vive star review on apple podcast. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

Her money has two incredible programs, finance fix, which is an eight week program designed to give you the ultimate money makeover, and investing fix, which is our investing club for women that meets by weekly on zoom. With both programs, we are leveling the playing fields for women's finanical confidence and power. I would love to see you there.

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