It’s been a fantastic 2006 at Get Rich Slowly. In April of this year, I started the site hoping that I could help a few hundred people on their path to financial success. Get Rich Slowly now has an audience of a few thousand. At the end of the year, it seems fitting to look back on the most popular posts as determined by you, the readers.
For each month I’ve listed the posts with the most comments (indicating the total number of comments in parentheses). I’ve also listed the most read entries, including the number of requests for that month according to Dreamhost’s stats logs. (I believe a “request” in this case means either a pageview or an RSS hit.)
April
The official launch date for Get Rich Slowly was April 15th. For the first two weeks, I toyed with the layout and searched for content. I relied heavily on CNN and Yahoo! news articles (and continued [...]

Susan at +amateur christian+ has some advice for first-time homebuyers — spend some time to search for grants, and you might be able to get into a home without spending a fortune.
Two years ago I closed escrow on my very first home purchase. I did it with almost no money of my own, thanks to some free money programs I qualified for. Some friends have been showing interest in doing the same thing, so I thought I’d share my story with others.
The Home$tart program pretty much financed my downpayment. It’s a Federal program funded thru the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle. It is a grant — in other words, free money. They matched $3 for every dollar I had in savings up to a total grant of $5,000. I somehow managed to scrape together $1666, and they gave me $5000.
They have a set amount of grants available each [...]

Joseph and his partner have made all the right moves. They carry no credit consumer debt, but they’re still burdened with student loans and a mortgage. They’re barely able to make ends meet, and are worried about what this means for the future.
I am 30 years old and in my last year of a Master’s program. I will graduate with $125,000 worth of student loans, whose monthly payments will be approximately $925/month for 25 years (my undergraduate loans are, luckily, paid off). The interest rate on $80,000 is 4.25%, $45,000 is 8.00%.
I own a home with a mortgage of $165,000 with an interest rate of 6.625%, with mortgage payments (including homeowner’s insurance and real estate tax) of $1,400/month, to be paid off in 27 more years. There is approximately $65,000 in equity. I have no credit card debt at the moment.
My partner has $35,000 in graduate student [...]

Frugal For Life: Frugality isn’t Voluntary Poverty
(tags: frugality philosophy)

Getting Finances Done » Sunday Shopping Circulars Online
(tags: advertising shopping saving)

A few weeks ago I mentioned Curbly, a new community-based DIY site. Here’s a guest-post from one of the Curbly’s featured writers, Alex Russell.
Copper’s proper. That’s the saying, anyway. But the problem now with copper for your plumbing has nothing to do with reliability. It’s cost. Over the past year, the retail price of copper tube for plumbing has almost doubled. However, there is a great money-saving alternative.
Using PEX for your new water lines can save you a lot of money. It’s a polyethylene crosslinked tube designed specifically for water. PEX comes either semi-flexible or rigid, and the joining technologies it uses are every bit as reliable as soldered copper joints. The Plastic Pipe and Fittings Association has some great information on PEX.
The cost savings of using PEX over copper are huge when you do the math. For example, right now ten-foot sticks of half-inch copper run about $13. You can pick up a 100-foot [...]

Guest-writer Paul Gonzalez believes that giving up television can save you big bucks. Paul and his wife run One Year Exit Plan, which provides coaching and personal project management services to people seeking long-lasting change.
Going “NO-TV” can save you money. In our “Your Relationship with Money” workshops, we advocate living without television. There are many benefits to NO-TV. There are obvious benefits to personal growth (better self-esteem, more time for family and friends, etc). Soon, however, you’ll notice your shopping habits begin to change as well.
An hour of television carries about twenty minutes of commercials. At thirty seconds per commercial, that’s forty ads an hour. Five hours of television each day would expose you to around 250 ads.
When my wife and I got married, one of the first things we did was give away our redundant stuff: extra couches, chairs, etc. We also gave away our three TV sets. [...]