I became a bit more productive in November and achieved my personal goal of contributing at least one post a day to this blog. While I am always amazed about the fact that some professional bloggers can add 20 or more posts a day, I will probably stay on my course by focusing on writing for quality.

Let me start by discussing the traffic at PFBlog. Pageview increased from 18,000 in October to 23,000 and unique monthly visitors topped 6,000. Google search is sending a lot of visitors on my way -- if you are one of them, I hope you enjoy this blog and will go back frequently.

Thank you for your support, my ad revenue is picking up too. Compared to several months ago, when my revenue could only support "a free dinner every several weeks," my situation is somewhat improved. At the very least, I can tell my wife that in addition to a few casual dinners every month, the revenue can cover a pair of high-heels.

Back to the substance, first thing first, I hope you enjoyed the five installments of benefit enrollment discussions:

Benefits 2005, Part 1: 401(k)
Benefits 2005, Part 2: Term Life Insurance
Benefits 2005, Part 3: Flexible Spending Accounts
Benefits 2005, Part 4: Accidental Death and Dismemberment
Benefits 2005, Part 5: Everything Else

Besides, below are my recommendations:

Heated War of Saving Rates
How MBNA Takes Away Your Benefits, Gradually
MBNA Starts to Issue American Express Cards
Home, The Mother Of All Tax Shelters
What Social Security Might Look Like
Coupon Mountain
How Much Are Our Public Servants Making?
What the Bush Victory Means for Consumers
Zero-Percent Certificate Of Indebtedness

One Year Ago

As PFBlog is adopting more readers, I found it might be a good idea to take a look back at what's around at PFBlog one year ago. In November 2003, I was:

- Running a Monte Carlo model to validate whether $1,000,000 is good enough for retirement,
- Refreshing my 401(k) strategy for 2004,
- Celebrating credit limit increase from Providian,
- Analyzing the Stock Option Transfer Program from Microsoft, and
- Starting my investment in saving bonds via TreasuryDirect.

I also reviewed Vonage, my local phone service, and Clubphoto, a great online photo printing company.

Back to one year ago, my writing style was kind of different. I wrote very short pieces and lots of my posts were comments on some new articles instead of my original content. Still, take a look at the 52 posts I added to PFBlog back in November 2003.

Enough for history-sharing. Thank you for reading PFBlog and see you next month!