Interview with J.D. of the Get Rich Slowly Blog

This is the 13th in a series of interviews HelpYourMoney.com is doing of other personal finance bloggers.

An Interview with J.D. of Get Rich Slowly Blog:

1. First, can you please introduce yourself and tell us why your started your personal finance blog?

Howdy. I’m J.D. Roth and I live in outside Portland, Oregon. I was born and raised here. I went to college in Salem, and then settled in my home town. I currently live in a hundred-year-old house with my wonderful wife and three cats who deign to accept our presence.

I’ve always been a writer. For a long time, I believed I wanted to be a poet or a novelist. When I discovered the web in 1994, I put up a site.

I posted a few stories. In 1997 I started my first web journal. I didn’t update consistently until I discovered Blogger, though. (Updating manually was a pain.) I started my personal weblog (at http://www.foldedspace.org/weblog/) in March of 2001, and over the years I’ve started (and stopped) several others.

In April of 2005 I posted an entry at foldedspace called “Get Rich Slowly!” about the various personal finance books I’d been reading. I summarized the advice. To my surprise, the entry got picked up by big-name sites like Boing Boing. People left comments with amazing advice, and I realized that this was a topic for which people craved information. “I should start a blog about personal finance,” I told myself. “That’d be a novel idea.”

And so I did.

It took me a long time to actually get off my ass and do it (cf. those “barriers” that Ramit always talks about), but Get Rich Slowly went live on 15 April 2006. I went public with it two weeks later. At the time, I had no idea there were other personal finance blogs out there. If I’d known, I might not have made the leap.

2. Do you feel you are on the right track to reaching your financial goals and what are they?

I do feel that I’m on track to reach my financial goals. Two years ago when I’d finally had enough of paying minimum payments, I decided I wanted to be debt free in five years. I’ve done much better than I had anticipated. I have one remaining debt (though it’s a doozy). My goal is to have it paid off in two years.

I’m actually in a period of re-evaluating my personal financial goals. I’m trying to decide where I want to go with things.

What will I do when I have my debt paid off? How aggressively should I save for retirement?

Researching this information gives me lots of fodder for blog posts.

3. Do you work in the financial industry?

I do not work in the financial industry, and I never have. My family owns a small manufacturing firm. I also run a computer consulting business on the side.

4. If you had to recommend just one financial related book, what would it be?

I don’t think there’s any one book that is best for everyone.

If a person is in debt and wanting to get out, Dave Ramsey’s THE TOTAL MONEY MAKEOVER is a fantastic choice. It’s inspirational, and it’s filled with great advice.

If you’re like me and you want to work toward Financial Independence (and/or early retirement), then YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE is best. (YMoYL is my all-time favorite personal finance book.)

But for general advice, my favorite book is probably THE WEALTHY BARBER. It has something for everyone, and is presented in a very readable style. The book is not without flaws, but it’s very very good.

5. If you had to recommend just one financial related magazine, what would it be?

I don’t think there’s currently a great personal finance magazine. There’s no magazine out there that’s suitable for everyday folks. I read Money, Smart Money, Kiplinger’s, and more. They each have specific slants, but they’re all far too investment-oriented for my tastes. If pressed, I guess I’d choose Kiplinger’s, but really I think there’s a huge hole in the marketplace for a magazine that caters to average folks with financial questions.

If any other pfbloggers wanted to pool forces to actually found and publish a magazine, I’m game!

6. If you had to recommend just one or two financial related websites (besides your own and that is not a blog), what would it be?

That’s a tough question. I don’t actually read many sites. I get most of my financial news via feeds. Bankrate always seems to have good stuff. I’m partial to MSN Money’s site, too, but I couldn’t tell you why. I’m always a fan of Walter Updegrave’s personal finance advice, but I couldn’t tell you who he writes for.

7. What is one of the WORST financial related decisions you ever made?

It’s so difficult to choose just one from the long list of candidates:

* acquiring my first credit card
* abusing my first credit card
* taking money out of my tech mutual funds in the mid-nineties to spend on comic books and videogames and computers
* taking a small lump sum payment in 1995 and using it to buy a new computer instead of paying off debt

Take your pick. The thing is with most people who have poor money skills, it’s not any one thing that does them in. It’s a pattern of poor choices. You become addicted to credit, or you feel you *must* give gifts to your friends all the time, or you love to buy shoes. Or all of these things at once. This was true for me: from the 1989 to 1999, I was making a series of bad financial decisions that put me deep into a hole.

8. What is one of the BEST financial related decisions you ever made?

There are a few that stand out:

* cutting up my credit cards
* reading Your Money or Your Life (and other personal finance books)
* starting Get Rich Slowly
* buying our first house

These four things combined have put me on the path to financial success. Each of them plays an important role in where I am today.

9. Do You Trade Individual Stocks and If so recommend your favorite 3 to 5 picks?

I do trade in individual stocks. I think that investing solely in mutual funds can be boring, so I have a portion of my portfolio designated to stock “play” money. And actually, this money gets a *far* greater return on investment than anything else I do. (It’s returned about 20% so far this year, for example.)

I can’t make any stock picks right now because I haven’t done much research lately. My strategy is what I call “gut-based value investing”, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else. I basically take the Warren Buffet/Rule #1 approach, looking for companies that have been beat up lately. I’m just not as methodical as Buffet and Town would advise. For example, when GM was at $19 earlier this year, I bought some. It was near historical lows, and I figured, “Sure, GM may be a crappy company, but it’s a crappy company that’s going to make some changes, and one that I believe will be around for years.” I sold when the stock hit $24. It’s at $30+ now.

After I sold GM, I bought Microsoft (MSFT), which had just taken a nose dive from $27 to $23. “I hate Microsoft,” I thought, “but it’s a good company run by smart people. Also, they just released the XBOX360, and they have a huge new revenue stream coming with the latest version of Windows. I’ll buy it.” And I did. It’s inching close to $26 now, and though I’m tempted to sell, I really think that it wants to live at $28, and so I’ll wait.

I guess there is *one* stock I’ve taken a look at lately that does seem interesting. UPS recently dropped form $80 to $70. If poking around revealed nothing amiss, I’d say this might be a solid pick.

But seriously: taking stock tips from me is one of the dumbest things anyone could ever do! :)

10. If you could give our readers just one financial related tip, what would it be?

Spend less than you earn; avoid debt.

This seems like simplistic advice, but it’s the fundamental Law of Money: if you spend less than you earn, you will accumulate wealth. If you spend *more* than you earn, you will accumulate debt. It’s that simple.

11. Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?

Personal finance is simultaneously easy and complex. As my tip above indicates, the basic facts are simple. They’re made more complex, though, by the human penchant for wishful thinking. We have emotions and desires, and this complicates things. If we were all thinking straight, we’d live in the cheapest place we could find eating only rice and beans. Nobody wants to live like that if they can help it, though, and so personal finance becomes more complicated.

Still, it’s important to keep the basics in mind. Continue to educate yourself. Read the same advice over and over. Take it to heart. And remember: there are multiple approaches to various problems. DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU.

Thanks!

>> Visit J.D. Roth’s Get Rich Slowly Blog.