For Tom Presley, financial advising is more than profession: It’s a call to serve.

That’s why Presley, a wealth advisor with Brightworth Private Wealth Planning in Atlanta, wasn’t completely satisfied serving the firm’s high-net-worth clients while his fellow millennials faced financial difficulties.

“I do find the work very satisfying, but so many of my peers struggle to find work, to save. I see them trying to buy homes and cars,” Presley said. “I really wanted to help them and give them advice.”

Taking matters into his own hands, Presley, 29, started writing 2MuchCents, a blog about financial and life planning issues, after beginning work for Brightworth in 2012.

“I read the publications out there for consumers, and there’s so much high-brow, long-winded, boring and technical stuff out there,” Presley said. “I saw a need for someone to make the information accessible. From a planning standpoint, there’s a lot of relatively basic things you can explain in a couple of paragraphs.”

Presley relies on friends and relatives to inspire him and review his content and address the blog’s back-end issues.

“Part of this was my wife’s idea—she’s the PR person,” Presley said. “She helps me proofread articles. I have a friend in graphic design who helped me make the site and the banner, and I have a professor and a coworker who check my work to make sure it is understandable and hits the right chords.”

Year by year, the blog has grown in popularity. Though he sometimes goes two weeks or more between posts, Presley has attracted a dedicated readership. His original readers were residents of Jonesboro, Ga., his hometown of around 5,000 people, but now they are typically millennials or retirees from as far away as Israel.

“When I started, I told everybody I knew that I had a blog and I asked them for feedback,” he said. “It spread from there. People are telling their friends and posting it on their news feeds. The first year, I had 6,000 page views, but every year it’s gone up and it’s gotten bigger than I thought it would. I had 12,000 last year, and the best I can tell is that I’ve had more than 37,000 page views.”

2MuchCents’s growing popularity comes, in part, due to organic growth through word of mouth and social media sharing—but it also attracts readers because it covers issues that impact families of every economic status in an user-friendly manner.

“If we were looking for something technical, it’s easy enough to Google and find answers,” Presley said. “I try to make it relatable. I look for small issues that there’s not a lot out there about, things that could inspire people to make an easy change to their lifestyle that might end up becoming a big impact on their life. A piece about a homemaker retirement plan for stay-at-home spouses was really popular, for example.”

Presley draws inspiration from family and friends, and many of his topics come from his personal life. For example, he recently published a piece about selling his townhome, and another about buying a house.

“Once, my wife and I were travelling in the Smokey Mountains and our car started smoking—we blew the engine,” Presley said. “We had been building up a rainy day fund and had made good progress at that point, so we were able to buy another vehicle. That inspired a post titled "Check Engine Now," about how people need to check their financial engine now and make sure they have enough cash for those rainy days.”

Presely says that this style of advice is especially important for his fellow millennials, who may not yet have investable assets and often face an uncertain retirement picture.

“For people my age, as I look out into the future, the landscape is really changing around us,” Presley said. “Pensions aren’t around very much, Social Security is cloudy, so it falls to our behaviors and our savings. My discovery is that although there are different techniques, mechanisms and strategies for getting there, for the most part, if you spend less than you make it tends to work out.”

To reach millennials effectively, Presley says advisors need to embrace the web and social media and encourage interaction. Every year, he requests financial questions from his readers, compiling the first five responses into a post. Other questions become a backlog of topics for the next year.

Posts on divisive subjects such as the Federal Reserve and the federal budget deficit generate heated discussion and feedback, but the blog hasn’t led to many prospective clients—yet.

“I’ve had it happen once,” he said. “There was a couple that came in and they asked about me and I started to run through my background. The wife brightened up and said, ‘Oh, you’re the 2MuchCents guy.’ Other than that, the blog and the business, those two worlds haven’t really connected, but someday they will.”

Brightworth, listed at No. 179 in Financial Advisor’s 2015 RIA Ranking with about $1.2 billion AUM, is notable for it’s technical bent—the firm boasts a sleek website.

Presley sometimes refers clients and their families to his blog posts to help educate them on financial topics when a technical explanation falls short, but he has endeavored to keep 2MuchCents separate from the firm.

“Brightworth has been very supportive because it has sped up my learning curve because it makes me think about how we explain things to people,” Presley said. “But it’s not affiliated with Brightworth by design because I want to use an entertaining tone that is understood. I’m trying to reach a different audience.”

As he continues blog to sate his desire to help those around him, Presley said the blog also creates name recognition for himself and helps establish his expertise.

“If someday one of my 2MuchCents readers decide they want to hire me professionally, that’s great,” he said. “My main focus now is giving people good advice, getting these savings and planning strategies out there for them so they can get themselves on a successful trajectory. The satisfaction I get is in helping people directly.”