Clever Dude founded CleverDude.com in June 2006 while working as a technical analyst in the Washington, D.C. area. A Penn State graduate, he built the site as a side project alongside a white-collar career that included earning a master’s degree and multiple promotions.
In five years he wrote nearly 1,300 articles on personal finance and life lessons drawn from his own experience. The blog grew from a hobby into a recognized early voice in the personal-finance community and generated meaningful revenue. He sold the site in 2010, continued as a guest contributor through 2015, and returned in 2023 after further career advances, paying off his home, and extensive travel.
Subscribers I've crossed 2,000 subscribers! The peak was on October 20th with 2104 people subscribing to either my RSS feed or subscribing via email. What's my next goal? Well I guess 2,500? Traffic Sources At a high level: Search Engines: … [Read more...] about Thanks for the Hits: October 2008 Traffic Numbers
I'll state up front: I'm an UNAFFILIATED voter. I used to be a Democrat (in spirit) growing up and in college, mostly because that's what my family was. Then when I actually started earning some money and got more involved with the church (i.e. I … [Read more...] about Smaller Government, Lower Taxes, More Freedom
Credit • Debt • Finances & Money
After skimming this article from CNN Money, I was going to complain that people are now whining to get bailed out of their credit card debt. I was going to ask why don't the credit card companies just offer a repayment plan, until I read it more … [Read more...] about Credit Card Companies and Repayment Plans
Many of us, including myself, think that the current credit and financial crises is the first major step towards the fall of America as a world financial superpower. Looking at how far the market has fallen, the massive layoffs occuring more and … [Read more...] about Will America fall from its Superpower status?
In 2007, I hit it big on Lifehacker.com when they featured Stacie's Frugal Lunch article. I was elated, until I got an email from the owner of an image I used. I wrote about the whole experience in "A star for a day. What I learned", but basically … [Read more...] about Blogging Tip: Using images without authorization
Faith & Spirituality • Finances & Money
Last week, I gave you a sneak peak of a new "version" of the Bible called “Bible Illuminated: The Book“. It's really just a new presentation of an existing New Testament Bible translation called the “Good News Translation", which was first … [Read more...] about Bible Illuminated: A fresh look at the Bible?
I thoroughly enjoy Trent's weekly Q&A sessions with his readers at The Simple Dollar. One of the reasons I like his responses are that they're honest, insightful and authoritative. Whereas I tend to often question myself in my own articles, Trent … [Read more...] about Left, Right and Centrist Political Sites [Balanced Viewpoints]
Last November, I found out that my graduate school automatically notified my student loan servicer that I was taking classes "half-time", which, for graduate school, allowed me to automatically defer my student loans. In fact, because I had a … [Read more...] about Having to pay back school loan interest
