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!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 [...]

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 [...]

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 is a guest post from my wife.
I’ve been gardening for almost fifteen years. I started with flowers, added herbs and vegetables, then a few fruits, then a lot more. I’ve gardened in plots and pots and raised beds. I’ve drooled over bedding plants, spent too much on whatever was my obsession-of-the-moment [...]

Because I thought it would be a great source of material for Get Rich Slowly, last fall I enrolled in a lifetime membership to the American Association of Individual Investors. AAII is a non-profit founded in 1978 to provide individual investors — people like you and me — with tools and knowledge to better approach [...]

Some people are luckier than others.
How many of you believe this? Why do you believe it? Are you one of the lucky ones? Or does luck seem to pass you by? And just what is luck, anyhow?
According to John D. Krumboltz and Al S. Levin, there’s no such thing as luck. In fact, they shirk [...]

Don recently pointed me to an NPR piece about a new children’s book that explores the concepts of microlending and entrepreneurship.
Katie Smith Milway’s One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference tells the story of Kojo, a young boy from Ghana in West Africa. He borrows a little money to buy a [...]

This is the first of an irregular series. I love to read, especially the classics. From time-to-time I’ll share nuggets of personal finance advice I find buried in the pages of the past.
This month, our book group is reading Betty Smith’s 1943 classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The book describes what it’s like to [...]

One of the fundamental premises of the Get Rich Slowly philosophy is that by making sacrifices and smart moves now, you can create a better life in the future. It’s a philosophy of deferred gratification.
But what if you don’t want to wait to enjoy life’s rewards? What if you want to take advantage of opportunities [...]

Dave Ramsey changed my life.
In the fall of 2004, I had over $35,000 in consumer debt. I was making a solid middle-class salary, but I lived paycheck-to-paycheck. My money habits were terrible. When I looked into the future, all I saw were years of toil to pay for the things I’d already purchased.
Then a friend [...]