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!We ran out of milk this evening, so I made an emergency trip to the grocery store to buy more. Generally we purchase a half gallon of one-percent, which [...]

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 [...]

Back in our young and foolish days, Kris and I bought an encyclopedia set from a door-to-door salesman. This was in 1995, at the very cusp of the digital age. We had been on the internet for about a year, but we had no way to know that one day very soon the World Wide [...]

Jan D. sent a note that the latest episode of webcomic Cat and Girl features a meditation on wants and needs. With the permission of artist Dorothy Gambrell, here’s the strip:
Click to open a full-size version in a new window.

Girl says:
To need is to live. To want is to live in society. What if we [...]

I love stories of extreme personal finance. In the past I’ve written about a guy who was homeless by choice, how to pay off your mortgage in three years, and about the most fuel-efficient driver in the world. Regular readers know of my fondness for these stories and sometimes e-mail other examples.
None, however, compares [...]

“To develop a better understanding of the wise use of credit, let’s spend a few minutes with a certain individual we’ll call Mr. Money.” Here’s another short video from Sutherland Educational Films designed to teach young adults about their finances. In this installment, Mr. Money teaches John and Judy about the ins and outs of [...]

For the past few months, a gym to which I used to belong has been sending me “special offers” in an attempt to entice me to return. Because I’ve begun focusing on fitness, these almost work. But so far frugality has prevailed.
It bugs me, though, that the “limited time offer” isn’t so limited. First it [...]

And now for something completely different…
While listening to Styx this morning (yes, really), I realized the title track from their 1977 album The Grand Illusion does a good job of describing a part of the Get Rich Slowly philosophy.
Don’t be fooled by the radio, the TV, or the magazines. They show you photographs of [...]

When Jeff Yeager and I devised the Ultimate Cheapskate’s Book Contest, we hoped that Get Rich Slowly readers would have fun with it. But your responses exceeded our wildest dreams. The contributions have been fantastic. There are currently 220 stories, with more coming all the time. Some offer clever ways to save money; others are [...]

I love family reunions. My cousins are bold and brassy. They’re loud, and quick with a funny story. They’re also cheap. At a New Year’s Day reunion last week, we swapped tales of extreme penny-pinching. One of my cousins told this story, which I thought was hilarious.
A couple of years ago, my cousin Mart decided [...]