Get Rich Slowly keeps humming along! Thanks to your participation, it was another great month around here, with a lot of interesting discussions. I’ve managed to collate most of the results from the recent reader survey, by the way, and will share them with you in a few days. Meanwhile, here are some of the best posts from the past month:

June 1st: Where we’re starting from
June 2nd: The lazy way to investment success
June 7th: The loneliness of the long-distance debtor
June 11th: 25 essential books about money
June 16th: Online banking: 13 choices for high interest rates
June 19th: How to handle a windfall
June 22nd: Remnants of things past
June 24th: My sister’s keeper: Sharing financial goals with an accountability partner (a guest post from Kinley Levack)
June 25th: The first three steps to financial freedom

The blog isn’t the only part of this site. If you have burning questions about personal finance, one of the best places to get answers [...]

Your financial choices do not stand in isolation. They have a cumulative effect. As you pay off debt, as you save for retirement, as you reduce your spending, you are creating a snowball of right action.
Or, to use a better metaphor, each smart choice you make creates ripples throughout your life. As you work toward financial freedom, you make it easier for yourself to accomplish other goals.
With the help of my Twitter followers, I’ve drafted a list of several ways that financial freedom makes it easier to accomplish other goals. Financial freedom means:

Freedom to choose your work. “Financial Freedom means choosing a job or career I want to work at,” tweets @squawkfox. “I don’t need money to be the sole deciding factor.” I think this is huge. For sixteen years, I worked at a job I hated: I sold boxes for the family business. I couldn’t leave because I felt trapped by debt. Once [...]

Summer’s here, and for many homeowners that means it’s time for projects around the house. Since we bought our current home, Kris and I have spent a lot of money to make improvements. (At this very moment, contractors are painting the house!)
Join Jim and me this afternoon for the 14th episode of The Personal Finance Hour. We’ll be discussing home improvement: what projects are worth the money, how can you keep costs down, and how do hire a good contractor?
We would love to have you call with questions and share your own experiences! There are four ways to hear the show. You can listen through an audio feed at the show page, or you can dial the call-in number at (347) 327-9144. You can also listen through this widget:

Note that the widget always holds the archive of the most recent episode. So, right now it contains last week’s discussion about credit scores (with [...]

Last Friday, I attended a workshop put on by Pamela Slim, who writes about entrepreneurship at Escape from Cubicle Nation. Before this meeting, I didn’t know much about Slim or her message, but her work came highly recommended from my friend, Chris Guillebeau. “Pam is the real deal,” he told me. “Her book is what a lot other books have tried to be.”
Based on this recommendation, I drove to hear Slim speak. I was impressed. Chris is right: She’s the real deal. I was so impressed, in fact, that I spent the weekend reading her book, which is also called Escape from Cubicle Nation.
Opening up to opportunities
Escape from Cubicle Nation starts at the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey: deciding what to do with your life. Slim spends several chapters discussing how to get in touch with what’s important to you. At times, this almost seems touchy-feely. Almost.
Even if you currently have no intentions to [...]

Every month, my wife and I track how much time and money we spend growing food. This is the report for June 2009. (Here are the results for 2008.)
It’s the beginning of summer, and that means our garden is lush and green and growing. It also means there’s nothing exciting to write about. We’ve begun to harvest a couple of things, but mostly our chores have become routine. We weed and fertilize while we wait for the crops to ripen.
One problem we’ve encountered this year is weeds. There are always some weeds to be pulled, but as many GRS readers warned, spreading horse manure on our vegetable garden caused more weeds to sprout. Kris is the weed-puller (and plant-fertilizer), so she puts the most hours into the garden. She spent four hours working on food crops this month, while I spent three, all of which were harvest-related.
Harvest
As our harvests begin, I want to remind you [...]

Kris and I had a l-o-n-g day today. We rose early and drove to one of Portland’s nicest neighborhoods for the 24th annual Eastmoreland Garage Sale. Officially, there were 141 families hawking their Stuff. Unofficially, there were well over 200.
For seven hours, Kris and I walked up and down the quiet residential streets — not so quiet today, as they bustled with a carnival-like atmosphere. (This year, there were plenty of people playing Michael Jackson tunes at their sales.)
“What are you after today?” I asked Kris before we started.
“Jars,” she said. She and her friend Rhonda are avid jar collectors, and they’ve found that yard sales can be a good source for them. “What about you?” she asked.
“I’m not after anything in particular,” I said. “I have a $50 budget, but I don’t want to come home with a lot of Stuff. No more Stuff.”
Each year, certain items seem to be for sale at [...]