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!There’s an old man who lives down the street. I don’t know his name, but every day I see him walking up and down the road with his cane. [...]

I’ve had a week now to adjust to the idea that I’m a full-time blogger, that I’m completely in control of my financial success or failure. To be honest, I’m both excited and scared.
I had the same job for sixteen years. I’ve never made a career change. I’m sure that many of you have [...]

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 [...]

This is a guest post from Betsy Teutsch, who writes about socially responsible investing, savvy consuming, and sustainable living at Money Changes Things.
Advertisers spend billions of dollars honing techniques to urge us to buy stuff; it certainly behooves us to be self-analytical and better understand the many triggers behind shopping. Here are some of the [...]

This is a guest post from Kent Thune, The Financial Philosopher, who applies timeless wisdom and inspiration to investing, personal finance, and the economy.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr
Recent volatility in the [...]

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 [...]

When I was a boy, I hoarded Stuff. I had what my parent’s called a “rat’s nest”, a closet full of the Stuff I’d gathered. Why did I hoard Stuff? Was it because we were poor and I wanted to own things? Or was it something deeper?
As I grew older, I became more discriminating. I [...]

Recent research at the Stanford Graduate School of Business suggests that shopping can lead to more shopping.
When such savvy marketing researchers as Uzma Khan of Stanford, Ravi Dhar of Yale, and Joel Huber of Duke noticed that shopping sometimes proceeded unchecked even in their own private domains, they decided to get to the bottom of [...]

I met with a Get Rich Slowly reader at the local coffee house yesterday.
Like many of us, Aaron got into money trouble when he was young — he made some dumb mistakes. He fell for a get-rich-quick scheme that left him deep in debt. For a long time, he floundered, struggling to find motivation, [...]

Mitch recently wrote to me with one of the toughest reader questions I’ve seen yet. He lives a paycheck-to-paycheck existence, but will soon be coming into a lot of money. He wants to know what he should do:

It is now 11:45pm on 14 January 2008, the day before payday! It’s also about three days before [...]