For my final piece of housekeeping today, here are profiles of all the regular writers at Get Rich Slowly.
When I founded this site, I had no idea what it was to become. I thought it’d be a fun way to share what I learned about money as I dug myself out of debt. Eventually, this blog became a full-time job for me. And more.
In late 2008, I recognized that I was becoming burned out. As much as I (and many readers) would have liked to keep this a single-author site, I didn’t have the time or passion necessary to make that happen. Rather than let the blog go stale or give it up completely, I decided to make some behind-the-scenes changes. As part of that, I brought on a couple of staff writers.
Today, Get Rich Slowly is unquestionably a multi-author site. I still provide the editorial vision, but GRS now has four staff writers, plus me and Robert Brokamp. That’s six writers and two editors! (It looks like April will soon be taking on the role of assistant editor.)
How can you keep everyone straight? Here are some mini bios to help.
J.D. Roth (twitter)
Founder and editor
J.D. Roth is an accidental personal finance expert. In April 2006, he founded Get Rich Slowly as a way to share what he was learning as he began to get out of debt and build savings. He had no idea what he was getting himself into.
Now, writing about money is J.D.’s full-time job. And then some. He edits Get Rich Slowly, but he’s also the author of Your Money: The Missing Manual (O’Reilly Media, 2010), the personal finance columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, and a regular contributor to Time‘s Moneyland blog. Really, though, he’d rather be writing about travel and awesome people.
J.D. lives in a 120-year-old house in Portland, Oregon with his wife, five cats, and thousands of comic books. He was born a nerd, and that’s the way he’ll die.
April Dykman
Assistant editor
April Dykman is a writer, reader, and a foodie who likes traveling, torturing herself with piano lessons, and documenting life from behind her Nikon. She’s spent an embarrassing amount of time at the yoga studio learning to do this and this, which got her no closer to enlightenment, but does open the door to a second career as a circus freak.
April’s personal finance awakening came after a trip to Europe when she realized that she wanted to travel more, but to afford it, she’d have to make some changes. The changes were small at first and then they got bigger, until she was finally debt-free. April has written for a variety of websites and magazines, covering a range of topics from personal finance to health to human interest profiles.
This Texan recently started a food blog, Love-Crumbs, a space for recipes, culinary literature, and the stories behind what we eat, along with ideas for presenting food and winning every potluck you ever attend. Because there’s always a winner.
Sierra Black (twitter)
Staff writer
Sierra Black is a blogger, mother, and frugalista. She’s spent most of her life broke, no matter how much or how little she earned. She started turning that around two years ago with some radical life changes like moving, shifting careers, and committing to buying nothing new.
Sierra writes regularly for Get Rich Slowly, Strollerderby, and her own blog, ChildWild. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, and Yahoo’s Shine. When she’s not busy blogging, Sierra loves to travel, knit, and play in her garden with her kids. She lives in the Boston area with her family.
Her writing focus on GRS is green frugal living.
Donna Freedman (twitter)
Staff writer
Donna has lived the frugal life. She’s been a college dropout, a single mom, a newspaper reporter in Chicago and Alaska, and a late-in-life university student. She has also picked tomatoes, worked on a chicken farm, managed an apartment building, inspected and packed bottles in a glass factory, babysat, cleaned houses, mystery-shopped, set type, and sold doughnuts, movie tickets, fresh Jersey produce and, when things got bad, her own blood.
In addition to her work at Get Rich Slowly, Donna Freedman writes a personal finance column for MSN Money and maintains her own site, Surviving and Thriving. She has freelanced for numerous magazines and newspapers. Her work has won awards from organizations such as the Society of Professional Journalists, the Women’s Sports Foundation, the Association for Women in Communications and the Society of American Travel Writers.
Donna was home in Seattle for only about three months in 2010 and is on target to meet or beat that record with her 2011 travels. Her interests are reading, writing, wordplay, and asking questions.
Donna’s puns give people headaches.
Sarah Gilbert (twitter)
Staff writer
Our newest staff writer is Sarah Gilbert.
Sarah is a blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart. She cut her teeth on her first Excel spreadsheet full of financials at the tender age of 21, when she began her investment banking career in First Union’s Loan Syndications group. She went on to get her MBA from Wharton, work at Merrill Lynch and fall in love with analyzing company strategy and endless rows of numbers. She got into blogging as a marketing strategy and loved it so, it took. She now is a freelance financial writer and blogs all day (and some of the night) long, with her little boys yanking at her elbow, in her beloved 1912 Portland home.
After spending a decade living on the East Coast, she moved back to the Portland neighborhood where she grew up, married a high school (sorta) sweetheart, and had a bunch of little boys who will surely grow up to be all-state wrestlers. Sarah now writes about food, finance and life and can be found at urbanMamas and Cafe Mama, or biking about the city going on and on about her chickens. Really, she won’t shut up about them.
Robert Brokamp (twitter)
Contributing writer
As a former financial advisor and English teacher, it was inevitable that Robert Brokamp would one day write about the management of money. His musings on retirement, investments, budgeting, and whoopee cushions can be found at The Motley Fool (where he edits the Rule Your Retirement newsletter) and in various other publications, including Get Rich Slowly and Newsweek.
Robert, who is a Certified Financial Planner, wishes to one day definitively answer the question, “Why do we make bad decisions with our money when we know better?” He lives in a glorified tree house in Alexandria, Va., with his wife and four children, and is obsessed with Christmas music.
Sundry elves
There are many other people who work behind the scenes at Get Rich Slowly. These “elves” (as I call them) perform a lot of the magic necessary to keep a big site like GRS humming along. There’s Andrew, the social elf (whom many of you have “met” via the Get Rich Slowly twitter account and Facebook page); Manish, the technical elf, who quietly adds features here and there; and Edton, who herds all of the cats. There are legal elves and business elves and public-relations elves.
Together, we’re working to help Get Rich Slowly evolve in a natural way, providing useful information that real people can use to improve their financial lives. We’re grateful for your support. If you have suggestions for how we can improve, please let us know!
This article is about Administration
SEARCH FOR RECENT ARTICLES
Out of curiosity, why the gender-imbalance among staff writers?
loading....
I’m just curious, are you conscious of the female dominance? Nothing at all against the terrific staff writers, just thought it would be nice to have some male perspective.
loading....
I’m very aware of the female dominance, and I like it. There’s a dearth of women in the field of personal finance, and I like that Get Rich Slowly helps balance that a little. (Yes, I know the field isn’t completely barren, but it’s still largely male-dominated.)
Besides, it’s not like I’m consciously choosing women every time. But of the folks I’ve looked at, the women have been strongest so far.
That said, my ideal next writer would be a young man who is deep in debt.
loading....
I would have liked a balance of female/male writers too. Honestly, the last few weeks of staff writer posts did not do much for me. Some were for a limited audience and mostly about running a frugal household. I’m all for frugality as we are also very frugal. When Baker was a staff writer, he really added a good dimension to GRS. Now, GRS has been mostly “How to save money on…”…cell phone, electricity, shampoo???, music…
See the trend here?
Having said that, I still follow the blog and just pick out the posts that I want to read. It used to be 95% but now, more like 60%.
I don’t mind staff writers but JD needs to curate the writers and posts a little bit better.
loading....
Personally, I don’t care so much about the gender of the writers, but I am with you on 60% vs. 95%, I do the exact same thing. I feel like the writers are very good from a — searching for the right word — grammatical perspective, but not so much from a content perspective. Personally, I would rather read interesting content that wasn’t fully polished than a boring but well-written piece. But perhaps I’m in the minority.
loading....
I just met Donna, she’s GREAT!!
loading....
Aw, Kathryn, you only say that ’cause it’s true.
loading....
Love you guys! I look forward to reading this blog EVERY day!
loading....
I liked these blogger profiles. They were awesome, we got to know the staff at GRS better and I know a lot of writers like staying professional, but it was nice having that personal touch.
I don’t really care if financial advice comes from a man or a woman, as long as it’s sound advice. It is nice to read advice from women.
I also think that female finance writers/advisers know that it’s especially important for women to have financial knowledge. It’s usually because they don’t want women to feel desperate and out of control financially.
I’m in my twenties but my grandparents were married to each other until my grandpa died. That used to be how things were, but nowadays things are very different. People end up marrying the wrong people and women need other options besides relying on alimony payments.
Women need to have options and not be financially ignorant and I think that female writers can really stress that message strongly. =)
loading....
LOL, I love the description, “torturing herself with piano lessons.”
Nice to “meet” everyone; cool to be able to put a face on all the writers.
loading....
I find it interesting on articles on how to cut back electrical costs mention 100W bulbs. I’ve never used anything that high unless it was an outside spot.
When we bought previous house, it had them everywhere. 2 in our bathroom had turned black from the heat they produced. As a test, I put 2 34W bulbs, and the room was much brighter than the self-tanned heat generators. (I put in 13w CFLs after the test)
I find the biggest suckers of power in our house other than fridge, A/C, and pool pump on a timer is 2 desktop computers, and the entertainment center that the kids use all summer. Not sure how much power the attic forced air fan uses. I think sending the kids back to school will reduce our electric usage some.
loading....
Ugh, people only notice an imbalance when the disenfranchised segment is dominant.
Anyways…. lolol, JD, Proust?! Really!? Heehee. (I’m only teasing)
loading....
“Ugh, people only notice an imbalance when the disenfranchised segment is dominant.”
Um, duh!
BTW, “disenfranchised” seems a bit of a strong word in this case.
loading....
I wonder if you missed my point? If there were 4 male writers and 2 female writers, I doubt we’d see so many complaints.
Anyway, I do agree that “disenfranchised” is a leetle strong, but it got the idea across. Maybe “disadvantaged” would be better?
loading....
Cool info and April is not only very bendy but Hot!
loading....
Another curious question–why the obvious skew towards younger writers? I would appreciate the ideas of someone in their 50′s, 60′s or 70′s who has been there, done that (or is still being there and doing that!)
I think your next writer should not be a young man who is deep in debt–that’s a real cliche–but an older person who is facing similar tough choices.
loading....
I’m guessing that most writers in the blogosphere are younger.
That said, i agree, I think it would add a lot more interest to have an older blogger, at a different place in life, rather than another young man recovering from debt. We get that perspective from pretty much every other PF blog out there.
(and this is from a 25 yr old, fyi)
loading....