Adulting the hard way with Plutus Foundation founder Harlan Landes
Harlan Landes lost his car, his job, his apartment and his girlfriend all within 6 weeks. But the hard landing became a foundation for building a blog business he would later sell for enough money to be financially independent and start his dream non-profit.
Harlan’s Money Story
Harlan Landes:
One of the things I was interested in was arts management and being part of a nonprofit organization. So that's kind of where my career trajectory went after college. Here's the issue with that though. There's not a lot of money in that, and I came out of college with a fair amount of student loan debt. Not as much as students coming out of college now, that's for sure, but it was a sizable amount. And the role that I had was not a very lucrative role. It turned out that I was spending more money just to go to work, than I was earning, including my small amount of rent, including paying for food and all of my necessities. I just wasn't coming out at the end of the month with more money than I had at the beginning of the month.
Bobbi Rebell:
And had you been taught anything about personal finances before? And when you took out these student loans, were you fully informed? And did you fully understand what you were in for? Did you know the math ahead of time I guess, when you chose this career path?
Harlan Landes:
I knew that I was going to be in debt, and I knew that that was expected when you go to most colleges, and that it would also be expected that you would get a job afterwards and start paying it back. The details though, and the specific numbers, those weren't things that I thought about, or at least it wasn't imprinted into my brain at all. I just knew about these concepts of debt. I knew that I would have to pay it back. I didn't think about, well, what are my household expenses going to be? What do I need to live? What is rent going to look like? What are the groceries going to look like? How am I going to cook for myself? None of this adulting stuff.
Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. But then, Harlan, ignorance is really bliss, because you're living your life and the debt is slowly building up, but then, this is where it gets interesting.
Harlan Landes:
Yeah. So as I was going and completely ignoring things, ignoring the money, ignoring my responsibilities, moving from one apartment to another. Because of so many speeding tickets I got because my commute was so long, I was on the road a lot. Those speeding tickets were ignored because I had no money. I found out one day, driving to work, got pulled over and my car was impounded because apparently I had all of these speeding tickets that never caught up with me because my address changed so much and I didn't update the DMV. So many things going wrong in my life. And that was just the start of it.
Harlan Landes:
I also lost my job. I also lost my apartment, and I also lost my girlfriend, all within the same six weeks or so. So this was not a good place for me to be in.
Bobbi Rebell:
So what did you do? You actually did something that not a lot of people were doing at the time. What year was this about?
Harlan Landes:
Oh, this was about 2001, 2002. A couple of things happened then. I was lucky enough that my parents, my parents had been recently divorced. My father was still in the area. He had just moved in with his girlfriend, into her house in New Jersey, and they offered their basement up, well she offered her basement up. And so I was able to get settled and get focused, and find a new job that didn't involve needing a car, public transportation, and get started on the right path.
Harlan Landes:
I found some information online just about managing my money, because that was something that I sat down with my dad and we determined that I needed to make a budget. So I started getting really into it and the nerdy way that I would. And I started writing online. I started a blog. Now I had written blogs before. I had been writing on the internet since basically 1994. So I had a lot of experience writing online, and I decided to write a blog just to focus on what I was learning about when it comes to managing my own money, about investing, about saving money, about using banks and using credit cards and doing all this the right way to help myself, rather than put myself in a worse position. Finally, I was starting to look at my numbers and figure out what I could do to make them better every month. And it became a daily thing.
Harlan Landes:
I started off this blog called Consumers and Commentary, and the first post was basically a banking statement. I showed all of my balances in all of my accounts, all of my debt and just laid it all out there. And I did this anonymously and said, "I'm going to do this update every month. I'm going to post here about different articles and things that I'm learning about money." Really, I was doing it just for myself. I didn't really expect people to read along. Most of the time, people who wrote blogs would just do it for their own journaling purposes and didn't care if they had an audience. Some didn't even have comments, didn't build communities. But at the time I just wanted to focus on how am I going to get better. If anyone wants to read this and join me on this journey, you're welcome to, but I'm going to lay it out, I'm going to do it anonymously, but you're going to know everything about my finances and we're going to figure all this out together.
Harlan Landes:
And then, the recession hit. Suddenly, everybody was looking online for great information about how to save money, how to invest. All of this information started getting really, really popular. Blogs started getting a lot of new readers. Newspapers, with their websites, started looking at the financial blogs as a model, even for their own columns that they would publish online. And it just created this great relationship between bloggers, even some podcasters at the time, and the more traditional media. So it was a great time to be out there and be a part of all this building of financial content that would go on to help so many thousands and thousands of people.
Bobbi Rebell:
But it also became a self-fulfilling thing because your efforts to get yourself out of debt and create your own financial security, actually, that blog, you were able to sell it eventually. Tell us what happened.
Harlan Landes:
Sure. So probably a year, maybe a year and a half into having the site, I decided to put some ads on the website. There were not a lot of ads on blogs before that. And around that time, I was like, "Well, maybe I can put AdSense on my blog," these automated ads, maybe it'll make some money that will cover the cost of hosting the website and give me some satisfaction for the eight hours a day I was putting into writing content for the website, in addition to my eight hours a day at my day job. And it didn't take too long for this to build up. Of course, like I mentioned, people became a lot more interested in what was going on with people writing about money through the recession, companies, advertisers, started getting a lot more interested in getting in front of all of those readers around the same time. So the revenue potential for the website grew pretty quickly.
Harlan Landes:
And I was able to grow that to a point. And I was also looking at the landscape when it comes to earning money online through blogs, when it came to working with different advertisers. And I saw that there was some risk around 2010, 2011, and I became interested in offloading some of that risk by taking advantage of the success that we had through the website and seeing if there would be any potential buyers. And there were several, and I was able to sell the website and that was after it was making, it was earning a significant amount of income for me. I was able to quit my day job. And it became such a source of income that I figured if there's any way for me to offload this risk, it would be best for me at that time. So that's why I sold it.
Bobbi Rebell:
Interesting. And what was your plan at the time when you sold it? Were you going to retire? Did you always want to create some kind of a nonprofit?
Harlan Landes:
My mom had asked me when I was, I don't know, maybe a teenager or a preteen or something, she said, "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" And I said, "Well, I'd start an arts foundation." That's kind of what I said. I probably didn't even know what I was thinking or know what I was talking about at the time. But I was like, I want to support the arts. I've always been a supporter of the arts. And I worked in a music nonprofit after graduation in college and I'm back doing that now as well. But instead of starting an arts foundation or a music foundation, I decided to take what I had been doing the past decade or so, and turn it into a way to support the community that I helped build.
Harlan Landes:
That is why I took the Plutus Awards and turned that into a part of the foundation, the Plutus Foundation. Now I'm doing kind of what I said I would when I was thinking about what I'd do if I had the right amount of resources. It's a little shifted, although I am also spending a lot of my time back in the music field, working with a drum and bugle corps that tours the country in the summer, when there isn't a pandemic, anyway. So I'm doing everything I always wanted to do and I feel really happy about that.
Harlan’s Money Lesson
The lesson that I have is, well first of all, people talk bad about passions these days and they say, "Well, yeah, it would be great to follow your passion, but your passion has to be marketable." I was able to make things work. I got really invested into the whole idea of sharing my stories about money and my money issues. And I was so passionate about it and I made other people passionate about it, and I found a way to make that work. Even though when I started the website, it was never about money. That wasn't even a factor. But like you said, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It became the solution, or at least part of the solution, to my need to at least support myself. So that was good. So yeah, that's an interesting lesson that I like to share that's a little different than everyone else.
Harlan’s Money Tip
Harlan Landes:
What I would love for people to do is to talk out loud. I was able to write about my financial details, and I shared it anonymously just to make it so that I was more protected in case I wanted to ever look for a job again. My salary numbers, I don't want prospective employers to find out some details about my life so I kept that anonymous at least to start. I was as transparent as I could possibly be, sharing my income numbers, sharing my debt numbers, sharing my account balances. And sharing the truth about the decisions that I make every day, not being afraid to be vulnerable. All of these things can help you so much. We don't have to hide behind our numbers, and we don't have to shy away from this idea of talking about money. The more you talk about your situation, and that can be just talking to people in your life, or putting it out there online for the world to see and for you to be absolutely a hundred percent vulnerable, that will not-
Bobbi Rebell:
And you can be anonymous. You can still be anonymous if you choose. You can do an anonymous blog.
Harlan Landes:
Absolutely. You can be totally anonymous. You can put your name out there, whatever you want to do, whatever you're most comfortable with. It's just more about the stories and the truth, and letting people know that they're not alone in their situation. And that is so important because we all look at ourselves, we see that there's no one like us in the world. Of course, every one of us is unique. Our situation is unique. But there are so many things that we have in common, and if more people would talk about it, then it would be so much easier for everyone to feel less alone. And they can see that there are other people who have gotten through whatever issues they have, or are in the process of getting through it, and we can all join together as a team and solve some of those problems for ourselves. And we can solve issues in the world as we come together as well.
Bobbi’s Financial Grownup Tips:
Financial Grownup Tip #1:
It is okay, in fact it is more than okay to take a step back. Harlan had a lot coming at him all at once. He went to live with his family as an adult, to deal with it. I, by the way, did that myself at age 30 when I was having a really hard time in life. Cut yourself a break. Don't be afraid to lean on those who love you for support when you need it. Just make sure to say thank you.
Financial Grownup Tip #2:
Well, Harlan was very public about his financial journey. He also maintained his privacy by writing anonymously on the blog. Sharing doesn't mean revealing personal financial details that can invite trouble. Just be deliberate and thoughtful in what you make public.
Episode Links:
Harlan’s website - www.plutusfoundation.org
Follow Harlan!
Instagram - @plutusawards/
Twitter - @PlutusAwards
Facebook - @plutusfoundation/
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