Money Tips Network

This reader story come from SB, a regular reader and commenter on GRS. SB writes about personal finance and personal development topics at One Cent at a Time.

Some reader stories contain general advice; others are examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success or failure. These stories feature folks with all levels of financial maturity and income. Want to submit your own reader story? Here’s how.

This is my second guest post at this blog. I am grateful to J.D. and his team’s humble gesture in allowing me to do it. I hope to provide the same value regular writers of this blog provide to you.

This question comes from a regular Get Rich Slowly reader who needs some help making some life-changing decisions. She’s reaching out to the GRS readers for some advice.

Between the two of us, my then-boyfriend and I had a moderate amount of savings. We had both paid off all of our debt – cars, student loans and all credit cards. We were proud of ourselves and felt ahead of other 26-year-olds we knew.

About 25 percent of his savings was in a retirement account and 75 percent in cash. And mine was the opposite, about 75 percent in retirement accounts and 25 percent in cash. When we moved in together we put together a budget with YNAB (which I love and have been using for three years now) and determined how much we could start saving moving forward, now that we had eliminated dual expenses like rent and utilities and significantly decreased things like gas because we wouldn’t be driving 240 miles round trip to see each other every weekend.

Note: This article is from J.D. Roth, who founded Get Rich Slowly in 2006. J.D.’s non-financial writing can be found at More Than Money, where he recently wrote about the regrets of the dying.

On Saturday, I bumped into Rhonda at the local natural food market. Rhonda is one of Kris’s co-workers and friends. I haven’t seen her much since the divorce, although we live only a mile-and-a-half apart. For 20 minutes, she and I stood in the freezer aisle and chatted about life and the neighborhood.

“Do you know any other places to shop for groceries?” I asked. “We like this store, but it’s pretty expensive. I know there’s another market near your house, but its prices don’t seem any better and the food quality is worse.” (This is actually the subject of an already-written but yet-to-be published post I’ve produced for GRS.)

This article is by staff writer Kristin Wong.

One of my money resolutions for 2014 is to switch banks. I’ve been a long-time customer of a big bank that, in recent years, has stood out among headlines that reveal sneaky and unethical business practices. That’s not the only reason I’m switching, but it does help me want to change.

It’s time to get naked! (Again!)

Last year, we started Naked With Cash, a series and feature at Consumerism Commentary. Last year’s introduction can provide you with the in-depth look at the purpose of the series. This year, I’m joined by Miranda Marquit to help organize the series. She, I, and the financial experts you’ll meet below, have selected four Consumerism Commentary readers who will work with those experts as they publicly track their finances throughout the year.

This year, we have four participants who will share their financial reports, exposing the results of their financial choices. Each participant is paired with one of our Certified Financial Planners (CFPs). The experts will provide insight and guidance that will, hopefully, help our participants take their finances to the next level by the end of 2014.

I have a brother who is a history teacher, and a son who is on his way to becoming one. For me, history was one of my least favorite subjects in school, but now it represents a major portion of my reading. Studying financial history early in my career may have been the turning point.

When I was in my 20s and just starting my investment career, I familiarized myself with the financial markets by looking at decades of history. What amazed me was that prevailing opinions about how stocks, bonds, and money market accounts behaved often did not account for some of the extremes — or even some of the norms — seen in past decades.

Claes Bell

Late last month, McDonald’s finally shut down its McResource website for employees, which collapsed under the weight of approximately a billion metric tons of Internet snark. The fry that broke the camel’s back? Advising employees not to eat too much fast food because it’s bad for your health. A lot of the criticism of the [...]

McResource, McDonald’s employee site that offered finance advice, gets McMurdered from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

This blog was posted by Claes Bell

A friend recently took her family to Walt Disney World over the holiday break, as many families do. (She gave me permission to write about this, by the way.) Hurricane season is over, and, well, it’s cold in a lot of the country. It’s usually not cold in Florida this time of year.

And a Walt Disney World vacation isn’t known for being on the inexpensive side. Everyone who’s gone down there that I’ve talked to has enjoyed themselves, and forged a lot of good memories with their children, though.

A vacation at Disney … but cheaper?

As soon as we signed the contract to buy our first home, I started dreaming about furnishing it. After years of drooling over pretty furniture catalogs, I finally had a place to decorate. I have also been saving money specifically to furnish our house and, as a part of that fund, I have been collecting furniture store gift cards.