The Blog That Changed My Life

In May 2012, I moved home after a short two-year stint in New York City. I was nearly broke, unemployed, and in a career crisis. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life after “retiring” from acting. So, I did what any 25-year-old stranded for the summer would do: I moved back into my parents’ house on Weiss Lake Alabama.

While there, my Mom handed me a news article from USA Today titled, ‘Ways Millennials Can Keep Their Job Skills Sharp While on the Hunt for Employment.’ In it, the author encouraged millennials to blog. ‘You’ve always like writing,’ my mother said, ‘why don’t you give it a try.’

So, I plugged in my old desktop computer (DESKTOP! Jesus — I’m aging myself every sentence as I type this) and started brainstorming names. I was big into my own personal finance journey and had just spent a few years working as an administrative assistant for a fancy hedge fund. I decided I wanted to write about money. I wanted more women to talk about it, know about it, learn about it. Specifically, I wanted them to learn from my mistakes. That same month, almost thirteen years ago to the day that I'm writing this now, (May 2012) my first website, L Bee and the Money Tree, was born.

What followed was a magic carpet ride I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams.

I got plugged into Twitter early and in a few months time more than just my Mom and personal friends were reading. The site grew. I began to learn how to monetize. My stories of rapid debt payoff, overcoming a shopping addiction, and buying my first home with $1800 dollars went “viral”, and I got featured in major media outlets. I began to learn how to work with brands and was micro-influencing before the term “influencer” was even born. My blog became a business and I spent every day not only writing, but learning how to be my own boss. Now that I look back on it, I'm astonished it even happened, but I had a lot of friendship and support over the years through the FINCON community, where we all were learning together.

In 2016, I rebranded L Bee and the Money Tree to Financial Best Life (looking back, this is my one big regret. If I had to do it over, I probably wouldn’t have rebranded the name.) But through that evolution, bigger things came. I got paid to travel, paid to consult with big name financial brands on how to market to and capture millennial audiences, and eventually I sold Financial Best Life in a six-figure acquisition to one of the biggest names in money media. I thought I'd walk away and focus on being a Mom.

I thought I could keep my fingers out of it but couldn’t.

Even though I wasn’t the owner, Motley kept me on to write, even through my maternity leave and the pandemic, and eventually I ended up reacquiring the site in the middle of my divorce in 2022. They were one of the first big brands to begin divesting from online written content creation, and maybe I should have quit there, but I was big into “reclaiming my voice” that year, for obvious reasons. 😉

The Creator Economy Has Changed

But we’re here in 2025 now. I’m closer to 40 than I am to 20. Not only has my life changed substantially, but so has the digital creator economy. With recent Google algorithm changes affecting SEO, affiliate advertisers slashing rates, and the majority of money being made on social platforms vs. websites you own, the creator economy has been gutted. I’m sure you’ve seen many of your favorite small publishers either close down completely or pivot into new modalities like Substack or TikTok. This isn’t a complaint at all, simply a statement or where we are and why I’ve decided to quit updating Financial Best Life.

I haven’t made any long term decisions regarding what happens to the archive, so for now I’ll leave it up but I will no longer be posting regularly or updating old content on FinancialBestLife.com.

With readership being only a fraction of what it was in the site’s boom years, I’m not even positive who will be reading this, but for those of you who do check in from time to time, I wanted you to know. While bittersweet, this change in status from “active blog” to “retired” is a long time coming.

Before I go and finish typing the last words I’ll ever type on the creative endeavor that literally changed my life, I want you to know a few things.

Me and my son are happy and thriving. I'm re-partnered to the most wonderful man who supports us both endlessly. I now work in real estate full-time in Atlanta and I’m successful at it. After years of writing about homeownership, I now help clients achieve those goals and while working with clients is very different than being in a creative role, I’m thankful that I’ve been able to ‘land’ in another field after a decade and a half of content creation. I hardly ever talk about running a blog anymore. Like acting, blogging has very much become this thing I “used to do.”

I forgot the login to the website when trying to post this.

But perhaps this farewell post will be the first step in me putting some of that back into my life. I've missed the way my fingers fly over the keys and how it's felt to put my internal thoughts out into the universe.

A Final Thank You

While bittersweet, I do consider retiring this blog a natural evolution. Things change. And in a few years content creation the way it exists now will change too. The internet moves so fast, I don't know if anyone ever thinks about how long any of it lasts. Prior to starting this blog, I don't think I've ever really kept up with one single endeavor for more than a few years. This site, more than my words, thoughts, and feelings has been the single greatest exercise in my own ability to be consistent. Perhaps that's why it's taken me so long to let it go.

I describe my time as a “blogger” this way often — it feels like I was part of this gold rush.

Some day I’ll describe to my son how I spent the decade of my 20s – learning how to build a type of business that didn't really exist before. More than the money, I’ll tell my son about the connections. About how people would come up to me in public and tell me how much they loved something I wrote. I’ll tell him about how people I knew personally would bring up these deeply personal revelations or circumstances about money, and talk openly about what was on their heart.

‘People feel like they know you because of what you write,” someone told me once and I feel like it's still one of the greatest compliments I've ever been given.

I wish I could sum up every step of the journey this blog has taken me on in the last 13 years, but no matter how many words I write, they wouldn’t do it justice. I’m mentioning the highlights here, but these are only a small fraction of the moments of how this work not only changed the trajectory of my life but changed me.

I have an email inbox folder titled “Nice Words’ in which I have saved every email from a reader where they told me about a time when something I wrote about made a difference in their lives. I started blogging because it scratched a creative itch for me and allowed me to learn more about an area of passionate interest (finance). The most unexpected dream of it all was how deeply rewarding I found connecting with readers all over the world would be. I wish it was possible to bottle up those micro moments and revisit them.

Instead, please know I am definitely keeping it all in my heart as I move forward.

So, here it is. The last blog post. I’m not sure who will see it, but if you’re reading—thank you. For every click, every comment, every message that reminded me this work meant something. I’ll never forget what it felt like to be read, to be heard, and to be part of something bigger.

If you ever want to say hi, I’m still around. You can follow along on Instagram @laurenbowlingatl or email me at lauren@financialbestlife.com—it all still goes straight to me.

With love, gratitude, and maybe a tear or two — thank you for the last thirteen years.

Lauren (A.k.a. L Bee)