I’ve followed your blog for sometime now and I really enjoy it. I’m interested in contributing guest articles. I’ve worked for 18 years in the financial aid field, at a medium sized, public university. I enjoy writing and think that I could provide a practical, “how-to” approach on any number of topics, to include: how to apply for financial aid, tips/tricks for completing the aid application, where to look for scholarships, taking on debt for a college education, how to work with a financial aid office, how to save for college, etc.

Thanks, in advance, for your consideration!

Brent

I have therapies 4 days a week to get me better and my goal is to be back to normal, whatever “normal” is, by the 18 month anniversary of the stroke.

So I guess you could say that right now my job is rehab…

Cheers,
Craig

I agree with JD’s attitude that it shouldn’t always be pinching pennies. It should be okay to spend what you can afford to on whatever brings you pleasure.

The trick is to keep it affordable and pleasureful.

I’m a 25 year old with a 30 year mortgage. Bills get paid on time but I’m struggling to set money aside for savings. I would love to get feed back from others on maintaining good saving habits. Each month I find something I want to work on for my house but each month that takes away from adding to my savings account.

A discussion over the wants of today versus the needs of tomorrow would be interesting.

I could write a story on how to host a great garage sale.

~Megan

My story is something like this: I have a list of 100 life goals that I work towards accomplishing while maintaining a balanced budget. Goals include Wandering the Great Wall, Scuba Diving at the Great Barrier Reef, Backpacking Across Europe.

If this sounds like your sort of blog, check it out:

http://www.hundredgoals.com

One of my goals for 2010 is to have a monthly Guest Post hosted at another blog, so maybe this invitation will allow an opportunity to share my story with more GRS readers!

Thanks for the opportunity to share my opinion! I think your ideas for guest posts and reader opinions is a good one. I hope you attract great writers.

I believe Tyler K. has pointed out one of the fundamental deficiencies of a blog, and I don’t think you can address it by coming up with stories other than your own. Instead of people getting bored with your stories, I would just get bored of everybody else’s stories. (Not that your stories are boring, just that I’ve been here long enough that I’m seeing some repetition.)

What I propose is that you augment your blog with a reference section or a coaching section. You have posted a lot of useful information over the years, but if I every want to go back and find something useful, I find text searches cumbersome. (I find text searches or tags only work well if you know what you’re looking for. When you’re learning, you often don’t know what you don’t know.) So a large section of reference pages that organizes the information and tips would be great to augment your material.

For example, you could have a series of pages in your reference section that go over the exact topic you have been posting on recently: the core tenets of GRS. You could have a section on Roth IRAs. You could have a section on lifestyle inflation. Each section should offer step-by-step practical advice on dealing with each issue.

Furthermore, I would suggest you don’t need to be the primary author for these reference pages. Something more along the lines of a wiki would probably be more efficient and also engage your readership.

Once this reference section has built up to a significant mass, you could use the blog to highlight interesting areas and ways to use the reference.

Thanks,
squished18

We’ve used debt and our home equity to start businesses, buy houses to renovate and sell, to collateralize our portion of the business we bought (with partners)seven years ago, and, this past year, to increase our exposure to stocks.

I would love to hear from others how they have used debt to create wealth.

Continued success with the blog, JD–and I’m looking forward to hearing from Tyler!

Otherwise, I love, love, love this idea of people explaining actual things they did.

And I don’t care how many posts you have. I want you to have the number of posts that you most like having so that you will stay happy and keep having good posts.

How did I pay off my student loan?
1. I payed more than the minimum payment.

2. Frequently crunching the numbers and seeing how much interest (Just over $5,000) I would pay over the life of the loan was a big motivator.

3. Finally when I just could not stand seeing the line item on my budget sheet anymore I took some of the money set aside for a long-term goal (moving) and applied it toward the entire loan. According to my calculations, I’m still on track to meet that long term goal.

Once I paid it off I felt that a huge weight had been lifted off me. Now I have time to obsess about other things like how much sooner I can reach the target amount in my relocation account.

I like the relationship posts & I’d love to hear your wife’s view of some of these changes. And I like the investing/saving how-to’s as well, that’s the real reason I read PF blogs.

Other story ideas:
*how out are you to friends/family about spending limits?
*how do your parents feel? Our parents – despite being VERY frugal people – are always pressuring us to spend more money. It’s very weird.
*accepting help, offering help – being on either end of this is weird and hard, and I’m seeing it right now because I’m the only one of my siblings with any money for Christmas.

I’d be interested in stories about how to stay frugal once you’ve paid off debt and have all the security accounts funded (emergency fund, retirement, college, home, new car fund …) and continue to save some amount. I’m interested in others’ thought processes as they decided what rate of savings was enough, for example.

A lot of commentary I see from readers here is about saving heavily so they can retire early to travel or to do their dream job. But what about those who plan to keep working and are seeking a reasonable balance of enjoyment now and security later? That sounds good to me, but it dosen’t provide the strong motivating force like getting out of debt does. I’d love to hear others’ perspectives on this.

anything non-us centric is nice for a change (says a britisher)

and anything about single people? being financially astute is even harder when you just have the one income! (though, you do only have one person to worry about, so perhaps its swings and roundabouts…)

i don’t think i have anything particularly useful to share but i will try to come up with something! great idea J.D.

- How I bought my car with cash.
- How I paid off my student loan in 6 months.
- How I paid off my mortgage in 3 years and 10 months–and raised many, many eyebrows.
- How I plan on achieving Freedom 45.

But they’d be pretty short and boring posts.

I vote for FS from Financial Samurai to guest post on GRS:

http://www.financialsamurai.com/

I’ve also put in my submission to guest post.