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!This piece originally appeared at Andrea’s Consultant Journal in a slightly different format.
Exercise is a funny thing. When you start a fitness regimen, you feel awful, especially if it’s [...]

The problem with the standard financial advice is that it’s bad advice. You’ve been told to work hard, save money, get out of debt, live below your means, and invest in a well-diversified portfolio of mutual funds. But this advice is obsolete — so argues Robert Kiyosaki in his new book, Rich Dad’s Increase Your [...]

On Tuesday evening I gave my first-ever presentation about personal finance. I spoke to a group of about 70 graduating seniors from Western Oregon University. My talk went okay. It wasn’t terrible, but it certainly wasn’t good. It’s a start. I learned a lot, and I’ll do better next time.
I was the fourth and final [...]

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 [...]

This article is part of Financial Literacy Month.
Most Americans receive a daily flood of junk mail. Some savvy citizens take a stand against the torrent. My friend Pam gets great delight from calling the sender of every catalog she receives in order to be removed from their mailing lists. This works well, but there are [...]

Soon after I started this site two years ago, Bloomberg Press sent me several books to review. I thumbed through them, but then put them on my shelf and forgot about them. Recently, while researching diversification, I pulled down one of these forgotten volumes, Kathy Kristof’s Investing 101. I started reading the diversification chapter, then [...]

Here’s a short-film produced by General Motors in 1939 called “Round & Round”. It’s a brief look at the free market system. It feels like it was produced for first-graders:
This is a factory. This is a machine in the factory. This is the workman who tends the machine in the factory. And this is what [...]

April is Financial Literacy Month, during which Get Rich Slowly is exploring the fundamentals of personal finance.
I don’t know much about stocks. I’ve read some books about traders (Den of Thieves, for example), and I understand the rudiments of the stock market itself, but I don’t know anything about the language of stocks. I don’t [...]

Today is the second anniversary of Get Rich Slowly. In celebration, I’m reprinting this revised version of the article that started it all, a l-o-n-g post from my personal blog dated 26 April 2005. One year later — on 15 April 2006 — this site was born.
Today’s entry is long and boring — it’s all [...]

This article is part of Financial Literacy Month.
I’ve never been a budgeter. Budgets seem too prescriptive to me — I prefer to use a “spending plan” instead. But after a month as a full-time writer, I suspect a budget may be in my future. My income is fine, but it’s highly variable. I’m accustomed to [...]