On Friday, I drew the winner of the personal finance book giveaway (it was imnotarunner@gmail.com), which means the reader survey that you had to fill out to enter is officially closed. Since this is the first time I’ve really gotten insight into who you, my dear readers, actually are, I thought I’d share some of the aggregated responses. I find this information so interesting, and I thought maybe you might too.
Demographics
I asked a few demographic questions in the survey and found out that my readers are overwhelmingly female. In fact, 92.1% of you are women. I also found out that most of you are in your 20’s and 30’s, skewing slightly younger into the 20’s category.
Lifestyle Trends
I also wanted to know a little about where you are in your life. You were very generous with this information too, and I learned that most of you earn more than $30,000 per year. Here’s a screenshot of the spread:
On top of that, about two-thirds of you are either single or in a relationship with no children, although about 30% do have children.
Personal Finance Journey
Here’s where it gets interesting. I wanted to know a little more about your financial situation, and you guys were so accommodating! One of the questions was about where you are on your financial journey, and here’s what you told me:
It seems like most of you fall into either one of two categories here, first, about half of you (52.3%) said you were either Just Getting Started, Digging Out of a Hole, or Living Paycheque-to-Paycheque. The other half (47.7%) said they were Out of the hole, but not by much, Things are rolling smoothly, or I’m a Personal Finance Pro. So half of you are actively working to improve your financial situation, and the other half have already put in the work and are now seeing the results. Interesting!
I asked how you would rate your financial knowledge, and a whopping 62% of you said you were “Intermediate” and I would have to agree based on the comments I see on the blog.
When I asked about financial goals, 46% of you said your biggest goal right now is to pay off debt, 20% want to save for a big purchase like a house or a car, 15.6% said saving for retirement was their biggest goal.
Favourite Blogging Topics
I also asked what your favourite topics were on My Alternate Life, which resulted in a very even spread. Take a look at the graphic to see what I mean:
And when I asked what you’d like to see more off, the results were even more evenly spread out:
It was so interesting seeing the responses of this survey. As a blogger, I tend to make assumptions about who my readers are based on who comments. It can be hard to keep in mind that there are many folks out there who never comment. Some things I knew, but others totally blew me away. So thank you for enlightening me. I’m going to use this information to write better content for you, and develop some free resources that will help you along your personal finance journey.
Did these results surprise you? Where do you fall in relation to the survey results? I want to know!