I have some exciting announcements for you!
You may recall that in early summer, I mentioned stepping back from publishing articles on Retirement Stewardship for a while to focus on a project called “NextGenSteward.” It’s a stewardship course I developed for young adults, based on material from a seminar I led for a group of them in my church in 2024.
When I decided to publish the NextGenSteward content, I chose the Substack platform for its ease of use, allowing me to get up and running quickly. Well, I’m pleased to announce that I have published 60 articles covering all of the topics I intended, so it was time to think about the long-term strategy for the Substack articles.
I don’t plan on adding a lot of new content; I will mainly update them as conditions warrant—an example being the enactment of the OBBBA bill this summer.
As regular readers know, most of the content on this blog appeals to those middle-aged and older, but some of the content may also appeal to younger adults or young people caring for older parents or grandparents.
The opposite is also true. Some of the content on NextGenSteward may be helpful to some readers of retirementstewardship.com, particularly those with younger adult children or those interested in topics like taxes and investing. But because I delve pretty deeply into subjects such as giving, taxes, and investing, even older readers may find something to their liking.
So, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of consolidating the content on a single site while keeping it somewhat separate. I considered a couple of options:
- Move everything to Substack (i.e., consolidate the retirementstewardship.com content and the NextGenSteward Substack content on a single Substack site, or
- Move everything to my existing WordPress blog, retirementmentstewardship.com.
I have also thought about moving off WordPress to two Substack sites (I already have a “clone” of retirementstewardship.com on Substack (at retirementstewardship.substack.com, but I decided to go with option 2 for a couple of reasons.
First, I like Substack, but it’s a minimalist platform in terms of customization and control of a website—it’s more about content. But I like the control I have over the WordPress site. I admit that I sometimes get frustrated with all the things I have to manage and the costs involved. However, I was able to improve things a little by taking a little risk by migrating the site to a WordPress installation on a cloud services provider, which allowed me to deploy an “compute container” (sometimes called a “droplet” or a “pod”), and tweak the amount of CPU, memory, and storage I needed at a fraction of the cost my hosting provider was charging me.
It’s not for the technically faint of heart (it was especially challenging to deal with all the URL and DNS issues), but it’s been worth it so far.
Also, if you go to the site, you’ll notice that I have installed and configured a new theme in the process, which prominently features some major topic buttons on the homepage for easier access to content:
The site is a little more colorful and stylistic, so I hope you like it. Other than that, it’s laid out the same.
The second reason I chose to keep the WordPress site is that it allows me to set up NextGenStewardship in a more reader-friendly way. In deciding on option 2, I needed to migrate the Substack content to my WordPress site, but I didn’t want just to add it to the 250+ articles there. Since the NGS content was designed to flow sequentially, like an online course, I wanted to reorganize it and build upon my previous work on Substack. In migrating the content, I wanted to import it exactly as written on the Substack.
I found a solution to create a document repository within my WordPress blog using the “SmartDocs” WordPress plugin. I’ve completed that work, and here’s what the “home page” looks like (very different than the main homepage, but it’s now a section on the site; I tried to tie the two site color styles together):
If you’re not familiar with the NextGenSteward content, the articles are organized based on the “levers” you can pull to impact your financial condition. On retirement stewardship, the content is organized in sections that correspond to the topics and “levers” I used in the titles on Substack. (The titles are unchanged here.) If you click on the articles link or “view all” on one, such as “E–Your Income,” which is “Lever #1,” you’ll see this:
On that screen, you’ll see all of the articles in the “Your Income (Lever #1)” section on the left, and a list of all the other sections, in order, on the right. If you click on one of the articles, it will open on a page that will display the article (on the left) and all the other articles in this section, as well as the other sections with article counts.
All of this is intended to make this content, which is structured like a curriculum, easier to access and navigate, while giving you access to all of the other articles on retirementstewardship.com.
I’ve also added a button on the home page that you can click on to take you directly to the NGS sub-site homepage. As you can see, it is in the top right-hand corner.
One more thing: Several people suggested that I turn the NGS content into a book, and I have also been working on that over the last few weeks. Since I already had the content, all I needed to do was reformat it and get it ready to self-publish on Amazon KDP. Well, I’m pleased to announce that the Kindle version is now available, and I expect to have the paperback version available very soon. I also have a free downloadable PDF version. Find out more by going to the “my books” page or by clicking on the image below:
Thanks for being a subscriber! I’m looking forward to getting things going again here on this blog as we go into the Fall. And watch for the NextGen Steward paperback announcement!
