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!Beth wrote recently looking for help:

I’m a public library worker, and my library needs personal finance advice!
We feel strongly that we need to keep a personal finance magazine in [...]

Multitasking has killed my productivity. At this moment, on this computer, I have:

Five open browser windows with a total of 59 open tabs (in Safari)
79 open text documents (in BBEdit) — I am not joking

14 open images (in Photoshop)
55 unread messages in my mailbox (and 48 additional unread Get Rich Slowly comments)
Three open chat sessions
Seven [...]

Smart personal finance is all about balance.
You work while you’re young to provide for the day when you may not be able (or willing) to work any longer. If you don’t save enough, you may find yourself unable to lead the life you want in retirement.
But if you save too much when you’re [...]

Based on reader suggestions, Kris and I made a trip to Costco on Friday to buy bulk yeast and a fifty-pound bag of bread flour. (We’re serious about this whole home-made bread thing.) While I waited for Kris to pick up some other groceries, I leafed through Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional [...]

This morning I reviewed the highly-regarded The Four Pillars of Investing, in which author William Bernstein makes the case for diversification and investing in index funds. At the end of chapter three (”The Market is Smarter Than You Are”), he summarizes his arguments (which I’ve reformatted to be more readable in this context):

Obviously, a concentrated [...]

For the past year, I’ve been looking for a book to recommend for novice investors, a book that would offer sensible advice without becoming too technical. I believe I’ve finally found that book.
In The Four Pillars of Investing, William Bernstein describes how to build a winning investment portfolio. He doesn’t focus on the details — [...]

Earlier today I shared my review of 50 Prosperity Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon. The author selected fifty important prosperity books and summarized them in just a few pages. For each book, he also provided a one-sentence capsule summary.
I think these one-sentence summaries are clever, so I contacted Butler-Bowdon for permission to reprint them, which [...]

Two years ago I wrote a rave review of 50 Success Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon. Its concept was simple: Butler-Bowdon selected fifty important books from success literature. He summarized each in only a few pages, distilling its key points. He also provided biographical information on the authors, and attempted to explain why each book was [...]

I write a lot about saving money. Like many of you, I’ve found frugality an excellent way to widen the gap between what I earn and what I spend. Frugality helped me get out of debt, increase my monthly cash flow, and ultimately begin to build savings. Thrift is a key component to personal finance.
But [...]

In his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss proposes that we shift our focus from end-of-life “macro” retirements to more frequent mini-retirements, which might be spaced throughout a working career. Though similar to a vacation or a sabbatical, mini-retirements differ in some key ways:

A sabbatical is a one-time event. Mini-retirements are meant to recur throughout [...]