Hey there, I’m Catherine. I own and run Speak LLC, which means I’m also the workhorse behind Budget Fashionista and Blog Chef. I’d love to tell you this company is some big media business with a huge team, but it’s not. It’s just me and some independent contractor support from my niece.
And because blogging is a tough business these days (lookin’ at you Google), I’m also a freelance writer, primarily in the personal finance space. You can find my work on The Motley Fool, Forbes, HonestPolicy.com, and a few other blogs.
My story
I’m not sure who reads these things, if anyone. I’m sharing my story because I provide information and advice for a living. And some people might want to know who is telling them to wear white after Labor Day, to save 15% of income for retirement, or to substitute tapioca flour for cornstarch.
So here’s my story, warts and all.
I am a financial analyst-turned-writer who loves fashion, food, and horses. And my husband, two kids, and one grandchild. And money, which pays for all the above.
I have a bachelor’s degree in marketing from California State University, Long Beach. A few years after completing that degree, I left my job as a financial analyst to get a master’s degree in American Literature. While in graduate school, I started freelancing as a writer. My big gig in those days was writing up summaries of earnings calls.
I completed the degree, also at Cal State Long Beach, and kept freelancing. The job gave me the flexibility to take my kids to soccer practice, which I loved. It also kept me working every minute outside of soccer practice until I began to crave a normal, 40-hour workweek.
I would later get a job writing for an automotive aftermarket company. It would have been a great gig except that I got promoted to run the ecommerce marketing department. I climbed up the marketing career ladder for about five years before I went back to self-employment. Somewhere in there, I also got a second graduate degree in User Experience Design.
Budget Fashionista
In 2015, I bought Budget Fashionista. I was still in the corporate world at that time, but I wanted a side project. Budget Fashionista had been popular once, but was neglected when I bought it. The former owner was paying a VA in the Philippines $4 an hour to manage things. (That former owner also likes to do interviews saying she sold a tech company to a media company, but that’s just not true. She sold a badly maintained WordPress blog that was hosted on a physical Rackspace server that crashed regularly. I guess she didn’t know about the cloud. Oh, and I wrote a check for the website. Granted, it was a big check, but still.)
I considered Budget Fashionista a turnaround. I’ve been cleaning, organizing, and renewing the content ever since. My hope is that it inspires a few folks to new ideas about style on a budget.
Blog Chef
I bought Blog Chef in 2022. That site hadn’t been neglected, but it was being run by someone who did things differently than I do. Let’s just say it’s a different kind of turnaround. But the site has a huge library of recipes and content that encourage a love for food and cooking. And that’s a mission I can get behind.
Freelance writing
Since 2000, I have written professionally for the finance, investing, automotive, insurance, food, fashion, and equestrian industries. I’ve been published in print and online many times over. See some of my work here:
- Forbes
- The Motley Fool
- Harbor Life Settlements
- Mycase
- Honestpolicy
- Budget Fashionista
- Blog Chef
- Motor Trend
- Soundxpression.com (PDF)
I write because I enjoy researching, asking questions, finding answers, and sharing information in a way that’s real and trustworthy.
Horses
My horse story is a personal tangent, but one that affects everything I do. In 2016, I started riding horses after a 27-year break from the sport. I initially wanted a fun weekend hobby, but it has since taken over my life. It’s also forced me to get even better at budgeting and managing money, topics I write about often.
Failures
Now for the warty part of the story, the business failures. I’ve had my share of them. The ones that sting the most are:
- Prospeqs: It was an app for equestrians and my passion project. I gave it my all but couldn’t find a path to profitability.
- Byrnie Boutique: An online clothing store that shipped orders straight from the manufacturer. Returns and fighting fraudulent transactions prompted me to throw in the towel on this one.
- Budget Fashionista: Find Your Fabulous: I wrote a book and it flopped. The book got an aggressively negative review shortly after publishing. I was devastated. I unpublished the book only a couple weeks after it went live. I recently republished it because I decided I stand by the content.
Only human
In this day of AI-generated content and fake personas authoring articles, I may soon be an obsolete relic for being human and researching/writing content the old-fashioned way. For better or worse, I’m too stubborn to do things any other way.