How Philip Taylor built FinCon, the leading conference for personal finance creators

You can’t open up YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without encountering an influencer who gives advice on how to make and save money.

Today, the personal finance content niche is absolutely ginormous. You can’t open up YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without encountering an influencer who gives advice on how to make and save money.

Today’s guest Philip Taylor anticipated this content explosion all the way back in 2011. That’s when he launched FinCon, a conference specifically designed for personal finance content creators. That first year he attracted around 250 attendees, but over the next decade it grew into the largest conference in this niche, with over 3,000 tickets sold.

In our interview, Philip walked us through how he got into the personal finance space, his strategy for growing the conference, and his ambitions for launching similar conferences in other niche categories.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below:

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Transcript

Hey, Phil, thanks for joining us.

Simon, it's great to be here. Big fan of your newsletter and these podcasts you produce, and so it's an honor to be on with you.

Glad to hear it. So we're here to talk about lots of cool stuff you've done as a media entrepreneur, both in the finance blogging space, but then also in the event space. But to start with, I want to just get an idea of your background. So your background in finance originally was that you were a certified public accountant, right?

That's right. Yep. My father's a CPA and I couldn't avoid it somehow. So I did pretty good on my first accounting exam and then it was all downhill from there. Just kidding. I enjoyed about a 10 year career in finance directly.

Yeah. And what were kind of like some of your early jobs in finance?

So I started out with the big four accounting firm, KPMG. I worked my way through regional firms, small firms, worked for my dad's firm a bit. I enjoyed public accounting a little bit, but I was like, yeah, I'm not sure this is for me right now. So I tried corporate finance on the internal audit side.

So I did auditing, but basically for one company. That was more of like a nine to five role, which I appreciated. And it also allowed me to travel a bit, which was pretty cool. So that was kind of where I hung my hat the last six or seven years of my career. And then about, I'd say, two thirds of the way into that is when I sort of started side hustling into blogging and other endeavors.

Yeah. So you started, I think, a blog in 2007 or so. What was kind of the motivation behind that? Like, were you reading blogs at the time? Were you reading personal finance blogs? Did they exist back then?

They did exist since about 03, 04. So I was reading several blogs, and they were just inspiring me to get out there and share my own story. So that was the genesis of it. When you consume for so long, eventually it's like, okay, well, I have my own thing to start sharing.

And so that's kind of where I found myself in 07. Had some more free time at work after the job and on Saturdays. Didn't really have a kid yet, so it just felt like it was a cool thing to experiment with. I had done a little bit of online marketing in college with our band, and so I was comfortable with websites and blogger.com or blogspot.com early on. So I kind of dabbled with the technology, and being sort of an internet guy. And then my passion for personal finance kind of collided with that.

And when you say a passion for personal finance, that's different from traditional finance. You think of finance like the Bloombergs and Wall Street Journals, and then there's personal finance. What's the difference between personal finance and what a lot of us think of when we think of finance content?

Yeah. Yeah. It definitely wasn't like your CNBC market street stuff. I mean, it was definitely like, you know, getting out of debt, getting ahead for retirement savings and basically putting myself in a position where, you know, I can fast track to financial independence. I guess it was partially driven by dissatisfaction with my career and sort of looking for a way out a little bit.

I was looking at these people on the internet who talked about things like maxing out your retirement savings, not carrying any consumer debt at all. I was listening to a little bit of Dave Ramsey at the time too. That message resonated with me.

And yeah, it was definitely within the personal finance space. So even my accounting degree and my CPA license didn’t really prepare me for everything in terms of managing my money because I was spending more than I was earning. I had consumer debt hanging around and it just wasn't going anywhere financially. I wasn't able to out earn my ignorance on the personal finance side. I needed to kind of learn it and sort of hack myself a little bit and use some of these strategies and tools to move myself in a more positive direction financially.

Yeah. And I remember years ago I interviewed the guy who started the Penny Hoarder. His name was Kyle Taylor. And like his initial version of the Penny Hoarder was just him blogging about – I think he had a massive amount of like college debt or something like that. And it was just him, just a personal blog about all the different side hustles and little tricks he was trying and then just writing about that. And that's how he built it up. Was that kind of what you were doing? Like, were you writing it from a very personal point of view?

Yeah, very personal point of view. That's why I go by PT to this day is because that was my sort of acronym I would go by so I could be anonymous and share these things like the exact amount of debt that I had, the exact amount I was trying to save, my salary. I was sharing these things to be instructive for other people. you know, who were kind of going on a similar journey. And so I felt like that transparency, even though I was anonymous, was helpful for the reader, but it was also helping to hold me accountable to where I wanted to go. 

So, yeah, it was a true blog, a web log in that sense, in that I was marking these moments and moving myself from sort of point A to point B going on this transition. So there was a huge accountability factor to the whole thing. And I really attribute... you know, me jumping into doing the blog, similar to the way someone would count calories; I was using this to sort of track my progress and it helped to kind of hold me to that standard and keep moving forward and gamified it, I guess, to a degree.

And was it called Part-Time Money from the very beginning?

The initial run of it was, I believe, Primetime Money. It was a nickname for me in high school – we all liked Deion Sanders Primetime. I was PT, and so they all called me Primetime occasionally. I just started with Primetime Money, but I went with the short URL of just ptmoney.com because I guess I knew enough to  keep the URL short. Through the years, it's iterated. People just started calling me PT, PT Money. And so I just shortened it to PT Money for a while. And then I would say over the last five years, I made the transition to Part-Time money. I like that because I sort of landed at a place where all my topics eventually started landing on entrepreneurship, real estate, side hustling, things you could sort of do outside of your traditional employment to kind of further yourself moving forward. It mirrored my story of becoming a blogger on the side. And so that's kind of the name that sort of stuck long term with the blog.