Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist Turns 2!

A Look Back

April 10th, 2016 is the day I published my first post on this blog. I was extremely excited to start writing and sharing my story with you guys. Watching the way the blog has grown has exceeded all of my expectations to this point. There are hundreds of new subscribers and followers since the first birthday last year.

It has been a very fun and eventful two years since the blog began. In the past two years we’ve lived in:

• Dublin, VA
• Fort Chiswell, VA
• Middleboro, MA
• Mansfield, MA
• Fayetteville, NC
• Newport, NC
• Harpers Ferry, WV
• Whittier, NC
• back to Newport, NC
• and finally Hubert, NC

Whitney is mostly caught up writing about our Travel PT adventures in each place, so if you’re interested in what we did in each location, check out her posts! We’ve taken weekend trips all over the east coast from Bar Harbor, Maine all the way down to Savannah, GA. We also took an amazing free vacation to Jamaica back in September of 2016, and I took my brother to Aruba in December of 2017 which was also mostly free with credit card rewards.

Financially, I have charted my progress toward financial independence with monthly updates. The stock market has jumped significantly since I first started this blog which has been very helpful for my net worth, although it has been up and down over the past few months. Stock market gains combined with high paying travel assignments, working overtime when possible, credit card sign up bonuses, and bank account sign up bonuses allowed me to increase my overall net worth by over $115,000 since this time last year—-not bad at all! I announced my Semi-Retirement this year and am actually past the point of financial independence at my current level of expenses. However, I plan for my expenses to increase in the future, so will still be working 3-6 months for at least another year. We also announced our plans to kick off Semi-Retirement with a 5 month long, around the world trip, traveling to 10 different countries!

Stats

Now let’s look at some blog statistics since inception. The stats from the end of year one will be in parenthesis beside the new stats for year two.

• Total posts:
  • 96 (47)
• Total page views:
  • 103,529 (26,754)
• Total visitors:
  • 53,207 (15,441)
• Total Followers:
  • 308 total = 175 WordPress + 133 email
  • I also started a Facebook Business page for the blog with an additional 811 followers!
  • (122 followers total for the blog at this time last year)
• Most popular post:
  • Thinking about Travel PT as a new grad? at 8,989 views
  • But since it was such a close race, I should also mention What is the Pay Difference Travel PT and Permanent PT Jobs? at 8,595 views

Looking Forward

It’s amazing to see that the page views and visitors have both more than tripled since last year, with exponential growth in total followers as well. If 2018 shows anywhere near this amount of growth, I will be floored.

I have really enjoyed writing on this blog for the past two years. I have had hundreds (possibly over a thousand at this point) of people reach out to me in comments, Facebook messages, and emails. Most of these were people interested in pursuing travel therapy, but I have also gotten questions about finance and student loans which I love to talk about as well.

I appreciate each and every one of you who have read my posts the past two years, and I’d like to give special thanks to those who have taken the extra step to communicate with me individually.

I’m looking forward to next year and hope to continue producing helpful and entertaining content for you guys. Whitney and I plan to work on the blog a lot while we’re out of the country for 5 months. We’re also planning to do Facebook Lives on the Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist Business Page on a weekly basis, so be sure to follow on there if you aren’t already. If there is anything in particular you would like me to write about, leave a comment below and I’ll do what I can!