I'm living in Denver right now, and I could be interested in going to this, but $149 seems a little steep.
I'm not shilling for the conference, but PT is a good guy. He puts these on for the national financial media publicity that they bring to his blog (and ad revenue), but the conference itself barely breaks even. I remember he mentioned razor-thin margins last year in Chicago-- the price of hosting a big gathering in a big city. He offsets the expenses with some corporate sponsors. He gets a lot of volunteer labor. One guy last year even stored all the conference supplies in his garage for a month.
Of course for $149 the cookies are really really good.
I don't think this will ever get as big as BlogWorld, but last year's 250 tickets sold out very quickly. 350 tickets this year, fewer than 80 left. I suspect that if the blogging gold rush continues, then he'll be over 500 in 2014.
http://www.financialbloggerconference.com/all-that-you-get-with-your-149-fincon12-ticket/If you're like me, you've been reading about these people for years and you're curious to meet them. (Either because they're great writers or because they seem like such whackos.) $149 is a cheap fee to arrange the meeting. The speaker list is here:
http://www.financialbloggerconference.com/speakers/ I don't know the titles of their talks, but their bios give a pretty strong hint what they'll be talking about.
Phil mentioned that the speakers are all booked. Most of them will be other bloggers who'll tell you how they did it, or what the latest challenge has been. Some of the speakers will be talking about money and financial independence. I remember last year one (sponsor) speaker took the stage to defend his company's payday loan program. It was like throwing a chicken into the crocodile tank, although Phil won't make any promises of duplicating that entertainment at this year's event.
Some of it is just plain entertainment. Most of the bloggers/writers are not known for their public-speaking proficiency, and many of them are flat-out terrified. One event designed to help with that is Friday night's "Ignite": 20 slides, 15-second auto-advance, five minutes. No time to be scared or to blather on-- just blurt it out.
USAA hosted a blogger conference last September where I met a dozen of the FINCON12 attendees, and it'll be good to see them again. USAA is also hosting a table at the event.
I'm going to be taking my blog out to its own website host in October, so this conference will be a good opportunity to tweak my plan. I'll learn a few new techniques and see what new plugins people are using. I also want to "make an impression" with any attendee who might be interested in buying a military financial independence blog in 2013. I like writing but I don't need the revenue or the blog work, and I have to get moving on the book's 2nd edition. I'd rather turn the whole thing over to someone else for their entrepreneurial challenge while I just write guests posts. They could buy me out at FINCON12 for a really cheap price-- or wait until 2013 and pay considerably more to our chosen military charities.
A truly Mustachian approach would be to skip the $149 ticket and wait for the blog posts & videos to trickle out from the attendees. Or you could even camp in a local contact's back yard and walk/bike to the Hyatt each morning...
