Finances > Get Rich Slowly
Get Rich Slowly: News, Information and Reviews
I do my best to cover a variety of topics here at Get Rich Slowly. Personal finance is a v-a-s-t topic, and there’s a lot of specialized knowledge. But there’s no question I have blind spots. Because Kris and I have no kids, I don’t write much about children and money. Student loans are another blind spot for me. Still, I know a lot of GRS readers have questions about student loans. You folks e-mail me all the time with questions I can’t answer. But I finally realized that instead of ignoring your queries, I should put a few of them out for reader comment. For example, Megan recently wrote looking for advice on coping with student-loan debt. Here’s her story: I got my degree from a small private university in...
Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:00:58 +0000
This article is by staff writer Adam Baker. Baker previous featured an article on his own blog entitled “How I paid off $15,000 in 9 months by selling my Stuff on Ebay“. There I was, bustling around the kitchen making lunch for my daughter when our late morning routine was interrupted:Boom! Boom! Boom! Milligan and I glanced toward the front door where the thunderous pounding had originated. “Holy cow!” I thought to myself, “There are only two groups of people who knock like that! This may not be good…” Luckily, as I slowly opened the door, there was a stocky little lady in her late forties or fifties (with no badge). “Afternoon,” she said. “I’ve some packages for...
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:00:23 +0000
This post is from staff writer Sierra Black. Sierra writes about frugality, sustainable living, and getting her kids to eat kale at Childwild.com. Travel is a gift. We get to see new places and cultures, meet new people, and expand our lives. Most of us, when we’ve put the time and money into traveling somewhere special, want to treasure the memories. There’s a large industry to support that desire. Gift and souvenir shops in the United States pull in over $17 billion a year, according to Hoovers. And gift shops are just the tip of the iceberg. Souvenirs range from cheap t-shirts with cheesy slogans to beautiful handcrafts made by local artisans. Here in Buenos Aires, I can shop at an open air market for leather goods, a...
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:00:31 +0000
This is a guest post from Jeff Yeager, author of the newly-published The Cheapskate Next Door. Yeager calls himself the Ultimate Cheapskate — and his wife agrees. Yeager is also a contributor at Wise Bread and on the Early Retirement forums. “Sure, we could afford to spend more, but why would we? It wouldn’t make us any happier.” — Those are the words I’ve spent the last two-and-a-half years traveling the country to hear. It’s a simple but rare statement, given that nearly half of all Americans say that they literally live paycheck-to-paycheck and have little if any savings. How can some people live not only within their means, but substantially below their means — even when their incomes are...
Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:00:21 +0000
This post is from GRS staff writer April Dykman. I’ve discovered that one of the biggest benefits to being a full-time freelancer can be one of its drawbacks: setting ones own schedule. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the reason I wanted to get into freelancing in the first place, but I keep wondering if I’m working enough. Am I getting enough done in a day? How often should I take a break, and for how long? It sounds like a minor consideration, but breaks during the day can have a positive effect on productivity. Work like Leonardo In many work environments, there’s an expectation that working longer and harder equals greater productivity. Whether explicit or implicit, the employee who works through lunch, evening...
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:00:00 +0000
Whenever I write about personal-finance programs, there’s always a large contingent of GRS readers who chime in to say they prefer the do-it-yourself method. Rather than go with pre-packaged money-management software like Quicken or Mint, they prefer to track their accounts with a home-brewed spreadsheet. (In fact, my wife is one of these folks, too.) I’ve shared a variety of personal-finance spreadsheets in the past. Some of my favorites are produced by Jon Wittwer of Vertex42.com, a website that specializes in Excel templates, calendars, calculators, and spreadsheets. The Vertex42 debt snowball calculator, for example, is an outstanding tool for those who are working to pay off their debt. I’ve been singing the praises...
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:00:08 +0000
July 21st was the fifteenth anniversary of my father’s death. He died of cancer at age 49, just ten days shy of his fiftieth birthday. When Dad died, he left behind a meager estate. Aside from the custom box business (which, admittedly, was not “meager”), he managed to leave each family member with $5,000 in life insurance proceeds, and that’s about it. His personal finance skills had never been great, and that included estate planning. More than ten years after his death, however, I was contacted by a company out of Florida. “We have your annuity,” they told me. “What annuity?” I asked. And they explained that my father had opened an account for me in 1977, when I was just eight years old. He...
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:00:03 +0000
This guest post from Kristen Swensson is part of the “reader stories” feature at Get Rich Slowly. It’s also the funniest post I’ve published since Robert Brokamp’s last appearance. Swensson is the proprietor of Cheap Healthy Good, a great blog about food and frugality. She likes nothing more than good feedback and bacon, preferably combined in a delicious slurry. A long, long time ago (2009) in a galaxy far, far away (New York City), I wrote about Jennifer Lopez’s butt for a living. And I made good money doing it. Working in TV can be a stellar gig. Your co-workers are young, talented, and motivated. After a few years, it pays well. Projects are at least marginally interesting, and you always walk away...
Sun, 25 Jul 2010 11:00:18 +0000
This is a guest post from my wife. It’s been a long time since she chimed in around here. Have no fears: She’s the frugal heart of our homestead, and she’s always looking for ways to grow and preserve our food. As Get Rich Slowly readers know, J.D. and I have a thriving garden with maturing fruit trees, monstrous berry plants, and an annual vegetable garden. Much of the time, I turn the garden bounty into: Jams and jellies Applesauce Fruit syrups Salsa Pickles Pasta sauces These foods are canned in glass jars for future use. This allows me to take advantage of large quantities of fresh, organic produce to make food we’ll enjoy later. But another tool in my kit is the food dehydrator. The food dehydrator has quite a...
Sat, 24 Jul 2010 13:00:46 +0000
Ah, relationships. Without other people, money management would be easy! Easy-er, anyhow. But love, family, and business relationships tend to make people do things they know they really oughtn’t. Take Patrick, for example. He fell in love, and it led him to commit a financial faux pas. Here’s Patrick’s l-o-n-g story and his questions: A couple years back, I met a girl, fell in love, and we moved in together. A few months into our cohabitation, her car died. Since we needed to separate cars for work, we went to a dealer to see what she could find in the way of a used vehicle. After a long time sitting in an office, test driving a car, and running her credit (which was not very good), the dealer came back with an offer...
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:00:36 +0000
This post is from staff writer Sierra Black. Sierra writes about frugality, sustainable living, and getting her kids to eat kale at Childwild.com. (It’s also her birthday today.) Who doesn’t dream of quitting their day job? Every day, countless hours are spent in corporate cubicles daydreaming about lives of adventure, creativity, and play — lives spent doing what you love. Last month, I took the leap. I quit my day job to write full time. Now I’m sitting in Buenos Aires writing while my kids play with their grandparents nearby. And I’m getting paid for it. To say this is the achievement of a dream would be a vast understatement; I’ve wanted to be “a writer” since kindergarten. But I...
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:00:49 +0000
As part of my downshifting project, I’ve spent the past couple of days replying to several hundred stale messages in my inbox. There were plenty of great reader stories, guest posts, and “ask the readers” questions in my stack of stuff, but there were also some good article ideas, too. For example, I had three different e-mails about bank-related stories. Each of these is pretty small for its own post, but they share a similar theme, so I decided to put them together in one piece. Not Quite a Bank First up, the always-awesome Ron Lieber at The New York Times recently profiled bank accounts that aren’t quite bank accounts. These tools are designed to give consumers better tools than they can get at traditional banks....
Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:36:45 +0000
This is a guest post from Robert Brokamp of The Motley Fool. Robert is a Certified Financial Planner and the adviser for The Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement service. He contributes one new article to Get Rich Slowly every two weeks. Stocks stink. That’s something you hear a lot these days, and with good reason. The Standard & Poor’s 500 sits at around 1060, a threshold it first crossed in the beginning of 1998. In other words, that index of stocks in 500 industry-leading American companies — companies like ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Coke, and McDonald’s — has gone up and down a lot over the past 12 or so years, but has ended up in the same place where it started. So you might think that if...
Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:00:23 +0000
This video post by staff writer Adam Baker is the last of a four-part series. Baker previously featured a post on his own blog entitled, Debt Tsunami: The Ultimate Method to Paying Off Debt. Courtney and I have recently stumbled upon a new hurdle in our personal finance journey: complacency. You see, we’ve experienced just enough success to make us feel comfortable, but not enough to be even close to accomplishing what we want. We budget fairly well, we live on less than we earn (or right at what we earn), and we’re able to explore passion-based income opportunities. On the flip side, we’re still making far less than we’re worth, we aren’t saving for college or retirement, and we still have a bunch of student...
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:00:55 +0000
This post is from GRS staff writer April Dykman. During the 2008 financial crisis, target date, or life-cycle, funds were hit hard. People who were just a couple years away from retiring held 2010 target date funds that lost 24% of their fund’s assets on average, with a range of 9% loss to a staggering 41%. Same date, different allocation According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), many investors believed that their asset mix would become more conservative as they neared the target date. But what many didn’t know was that the amount of risk could vary widely, even among funds with the same target date. From the Washington Post: The SEC said that life-cycle funds with the same target date had equity exposures that...
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:00:43 +0000
“This is it,” I told my wife last Monday. “This is what?” Kris asked. “This is the first day of the rest of my life,” I said. She knew what I meant. For the past few years, I’ve been living in a self-created whirlwind of busy-ness. I know a blog like this often seems calm and quiet on the surface, but underneath there’s usually a flurry of turbulent activity. “Look,” I said, showing her my calendar. “As of today, I have nothing major scheduled. I don’t have any book deadlines, I don’t have any speaking engagements. I don’t have anything at all.” When Money Meant More Than Time Before I started Get Rich Slowly in 2006, I had a lot of free time. After I...
Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:00:56 +0000