Get Rich Slowly

If you’re new here, you may want to learn what this site is about. I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Personal finance is filled with tough decisions. Prepay the mortgage or invest the money? Pay down high interest debt first or use a debt snowball to tackle the small [...]

Jason sent me a question yesterday that neatly encapsulates a lot of the mail I receive, as well as rounding up some of the topics we’ve been discussing this week regarding life after school. “I’m living on credit,” he wrote. Here’s his story:

I graduated a year ago with a useless degree but what I thought [...]

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a short presentation about personal finance to a group of seniors at Western Oregon University. I’ll begin by providing a brief version of my own post-college financial failures, but I want to spend most of the talk providing two or three great take-aways that these young adults can put to use [...]

Dan wrote with a question unlike any I’ve received before. He lives in Alaska, where the residents of Juneau have been confronted with a sudden energy crisis (more here). Here’s Dan’s story:

I am facing a unique energy situation. I live in Juneau, Alaska. Last Wednesday, we had an avalanche which affected the electricity generation [...]

Recently in the Get Rich Slowly discussion forums, SouthernGent posted a perplexing problem. Here’s his story:

My wife and I have been debt-free for over three years now, meaning no credit card debt and only our mortgage. When I ran our credit report the other day (which I do annually), I noticed three cards under my [...]

I write a lot about frugality, about saving for the future. But what about enjoying life today? My friend Matt recently asked, “Amid all the saving and sacrifices you make to keep your financial life in order, what is your one extravagance that you deem worth spending money on? I know with you it’s that [...]

Jay wrote with a question that I think most of us have had to face at one time or another: What do you do when you feel like you’re slipping into bad financial habits? Here’s his story:

I have no real debt besides some student loans on which the monthly payments and interest are negligible and [...]

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a brainstorming session about online personal finance tools. The people behind this workshop want to know what the average person is looking for when she chooses a tool to manage her money. I promised to poll GRS readers for suggestions.
How I manage my money
For years, I’ve used Quicken to [...]

In Wednesday’s discussion about how to live on less and love it, Steve left an interesting comment:

One topic I never see covered is “extreme finances” or even simple frugality in relationship to being single. I’m not talking about being a cheapskate during dinner, but maintaining a low-powered lifestyle while seeking a mate. Like it or [...]

Consumer debt is bad. Buying lots of Stuff on credit cards is a sure path to financial woe. But while some people argue that all debt is bad, most experts agree that certain debts are acceptable (good, even). The two most common examples are mortgage debt and college loans. The average person cannot afford to [...]