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 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 [...]

Did you know that when you buy a gift card, you’re essentially loaning money to a company? Chris H. forwarded a MSNBC story that describes how after bankruptcies, gift cards can be worthless:
The Sharper Image announced late last month that it was suspending the acceptance of gift cards, at least temporarily. It urged shoppers to [...]

This is a guest post from Lisa Tiffin, a freelance writer who covers food, lifestyle, business, and green living.
I have a confession to make: I like commercials. Even though they can be boring, insulting, and just plain bothersome, on some level they intrigue me. I often wonder why certain ads fail miserably while others succeed [...]

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 [...]

We received a Costco coupon book in the mail today. Costco — a membership warehouse store — has very low prices and generally does not take coupons. A few times a year, though, they send out flyers with special discounts.
Kris flipped through the book first, clipping coupons for kleenex, cat litter, and ziploc bags. When [...]

Marshall Loeb at MarketWatch recently shared some tips for online coupon clipping:
A recent study by comScore, an Internet information provider that tracks consumer behavior, found that 53% of consumers say they regularly visit brand Web sites to find promotions.
Visiting a manufacturer’s web site is a great way to find coupons (or other promotions) for products [...]

Yesterday morning was a rough one for me. It’s a day I both dread and crave every year: Steve Jobs’ Macworld Conference keynote address. I’m a Macintosh fanboy from way back, and as other Mac fanboys can attest, there are few things more dangerous to our wallets than new products from Apple.
In fact, there’s [...]

This is a guest post from Amanda, a Colorado tech writer and an activist for children with congenital heart disease.
I grew up poor: single-wide trailer-house, shared-a-room-with-two-sisters, garage-sale-wardrobe, government-cheese, worked-full-time-in-high-school, and paid-for-my-own-cap-and-gown poor. You might think that growing up poor would have made me frugal. Not so. While I do have an overwhelming urge to get [...]

Did you get a lot of gift cards for Christmas? Would you rather have cash? Would you rather have a card for another store? Richard O. Johnson at the fascinating Beyond Barter has created a page highlighting smart gift card strategies: how to best acquire or dispose of them.
This page offers a wealth of sound, [...]

Kris and I have been reading Unplug the Christmas Machine by Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli. This book urges readers to escape the commercialism of the holiday season, to make it a “joyful, stress-free” time for the family. In a chapter entitled “The Four Things Children Really Want for Christmas”, the authors write:

One concern [...]