Hi. I'm Jeff from London, Ontario. I'm 23 years old and I've just finished my Master's degree in Economics. I managed to work at the campus library and as a tutor (and a few other part time jobs in between) through university and ended up paying off all my student debt completely. Since then, I've started investing my extra cash in mutual funds and taken an interest in personal finance. I stumbled onto Get Rich Slowly sometime over Christmas holidays where I spent several hours catching up on all the archived posts that I'd missed.

Hi All,

Just joined today and am looking forward to participating in some great discussions. I just relocated to Portland from DC and am busy trying to re-establish my company while also keeping up online and enjoying my new city. Look forward to interacting with all of you!

pf101

Welcome, pf101! I look forward to seeing your expertise around here. I'm in Portland, too, as are a number of other frequent readers of this site. In fact, I've often thought it would be fun to have a Very Frugal Gathering of Get Rich Slowly readers. That's something I'm kicking around. Won't happen this summer, but maybe next. I'd love to hear more about what your company does...

Hi JD,

Thanks for the welcome. I've been reading your blog for a while and meant to sign up for the forum ages ago but then I got involved in moving and all that fun stuff.

I think a Portland gathering would be fun and as someone who seems to be addicted to event planning, I'd be more than happy to help out with organizing it.

As far as what I do, I'm basically in the education business. The name of my company is Personal Finance 101 and that's just what it is. I teach people the basics about managing their money. I have a series of 6 core classes that I teach (Goal Setting, Budgeting, Debt Management, Credit, Investing and Retirement) but I also do custom classes and seminars for larger groups. I'm not on the "advising" side in that I don't give specific investment advice. Mostly I just teach people the skills they need to help them prevent (or recover from) financial mistakes. I'm currently developing a class for couples (see survey in signature).

Along with that, I also do some benefits consulting for companies. I'll go in and review their benefits program and make recommendations for changes (or not). Or, they'll bring me in to teach their employees about the benefits being offered and how to take full advantage of them. Since companies aren't allowed to give financial advice, many times they bring in people from the outside to do some educating - I'm those people.

Hope that answered your question but if not, let me know and I can go into more detail - or you can check out my website at www.personalfinance101.org.

Thanks for starting what looks to be a productive forum. I look forward to participating.

pf101

Greetings! I finally made it over to the News Forum – only three more to go. I think I'll be hanging around Personal Finance mostly.

A native New Englander, having spent a chunk of years in DC, I’m more of a philosopher than a pundit. Hopefully I’ll be able to bring a thoughtful opinion to the table. The challenge will be in keeping it short!

Bill

Hi everyone,

I just started this personal finance thing, learning about getting out of debt, building wealth etc. I reside in Oregon and will be moving to Portland to attend Portland State for my CPA certificate. While I do try to contribute most of my time is spent lurking and reading since I still have lots to learn. But hopefully that will change.

Good to be here and I look forward to participating!

I'm a soon-to-be-30 web writer in Chicago. I'm working toward having a positive net worth for the first time in my life. I have a pile of student loans and some credit card debt, plus a big chunk of house down payment to repay to my boyfriend.

I became a freelance web writer a few months ago, and that's going quite well. Plus I found out a couple weeks ago that I'm also qualified as an information architect and a content manager, which means I have a lot of options for which direction to take my career.

Jef and I live in a 1924 Chicago bungalow with our cats, Saturn and Pluto. Most of my money goes toward restoration and filling our city lot with gorgeous gardens. This has contributed a lot to the credit card debts, but I'm wising up now. (We run a houseblog at http://hellohouse.polishoperative.com. It's out of date at the moment, but will be updated soon.)

Since there are some other Nintendo nerds on this board, I'll say that my favorite games of late are Super Paper Mario, Animal Crossing, and Super Mario Sunshine. (I'm a fan of the toony games.) I also cheat on Nintendo with Katamari and DDR on PS2.

Cheers!

Hi everybody!

I am a full-time mother of many little ones. My husband is a superintendent of a construction company, and he also restores and sells classic cars. We live waaay out on our acerage, on the west coast, and are pretty "crunchy" and Christian.

Our main financial goal is to be completely debt-free, so we can have more freedom in our lives. We are currently paying off our car very quickly, then on to our mortgage, then freedom! We think we have 5-7 years ahead of us on our debt-elimination plan, so will be done by our mid thirties.

deleted deleted deleted deleted deleted deleted

Welcome, 144mph. I hope this forum is able to provide some of the support you're looking for. It's relatively young, but I've been impressed by the level of conversation here. The participants seem pretty darn sharp!

Hi, my name is Rohit, thanks JD for letting me know about the Get Rich Slowly forum. I can see a great bunch of people all working towards a common goal of learning and improving personal finanace and striving for personal development. I look forward to join the gang.

About myself, I am Indian by nationality and have been in the US since Fall 2002. I came here to do my Master in Computer Engg and later on changed it to a Phd program. For the past one year I have been working with a software development company as an application developer. I am based in Mississippi ( i can see a lot of people smiling), i did my schooling over here in Mississippi State University and continued my job here too.

I look forward to learn from you'll about personal financing and share my knowledge too.

Hi everyone - I'm glad to see that the forums are looking pretty active here. My name is Beth, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, having moved here a year ago for a job. Before that I lived in Portland for ten years *snif* - I miss a lot of things about it, but to be truthful, my life is a LOT more fulfilling post-move. I never loved this part of the country, but it definitely doesn't suck.

Anyway, finance: I of course don't have a prayer of owning a home here, but for the most part that's okay with me (since I refuse to have a massive commute or huge mortgage). I just finished paying off my credit card, and am now going to double up my car payments (to pay it off by next spring) and then will triple up my grad school loans, so they'll be paid off in something like 5 years. In the meantime I'm saving 16% toward retirement (and getting a 4% match), and will also start putting some money in the bank to bulk up my emergency fund, travel fund, and that mythical house fund.

I've been interested in finance and simplicity for a long time - I used to frequent the Motley Fool forums in 2000-2001 - so I feel pretty fortunate in that I'm fairly well informed and not massively in debt. That having been said, I'm single and in my mid 30s so it's a good thing I'm in such good shape, and I still feel like I have a way to go. Mostly I think that I'll find inspiration and community in the forums, and that's what I need. So, hi everyone!

I've been visiting the GRS blog and forum frequently and finally have decided to sign-up. I live in Southern California and also started my own personal finance blog just two months ago. Anyways, there are really a lot of interesting topics here in the forum and it's really nice to see a lot of people sharing personal finance thoughts and insights. [/code]

Hi everyone!

First of all, Thank you J.D. for helping me activate my account manually.

Let me introduce myself...

My name is Harrison, a 24 years old boy from Malaysia. My Goal is achieving financial freedom because I'm lazy...
I love traveling and freedom. So I decide to achieve financial freedom in order to get the power of choice for my life. I will try my best to learn how to make more money, manage my money and invest my money. I hope we can help each other in this forum so everyone will have some improvement and achieve whatever financial goal we have! That's all from me.

Good Luck
Harrison

Hello all,

My name is Melissa and I live in Orlando, Florida with my 2 cats Jake and Josie (see their pages on Catster). I am 37 and have great credit but lots of debt due to going back to school at 29. I ended up with a Master's Degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Currently, I am a Recruiter for a timeshare resort....not my dream job but it's tough to find jobs in my field in Florida.
I'm steadily plugging away at getting rid of my debt - around $33,000 (2.85% interest) in student loans, $6,000(4.25% interest) in a car loan, and $3,000(0% interest) in credit card debt. I have $9,000 in a Vanguard Mutual Fund that is doing quite well. I also have an emergency fund of $3,000 in an Emigrant Direct savings account (5.05%). My salary does not allow me to pay off much of my debt, so I've placed my student loans into forbearance so that I can concentrate on paying off the credit card debt.

My hobbies are cycling and gardening. I'd love to grow food, but don't have much space and Florida has lots of bugs to deal with. My dream is to work from home and live in the mountains or on a farm so that I can rescue cats.

I love that there are other people out there who are really thinking about their finances and trying to educate themselves to make more intelligent choices