No Debt Plan

No Debt Plan is a blog about living a debt-free life. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (e-mail subscription also available). Learn more about me, or some of my most popular posts. Thanks for visiting!

Please consider participating in my first blog reader survey. Participate and you could win $10. I plan to do a survey every 3 to 6 months to guide me towards focusing this blog towards what you want to read. To increase the quality of the blog.

An outline of the goals of this survey:

• Learn more about who my readers are
• Learn how you found the blog, why you stay, if you will stay
• Learn what topics you like, what topics you hate, what topics you want to see more and less of
• Discover anything else that you like/don’t like or want to see more/less of

The ‘Rules’

Let’s be clear: I want your honest, courteous, and constructive feedback. There are a few comment boxes in the survey, so this is where I want you to leave your feedback.

If you take the survey, you can be entered in a drawing to win $10. You have the option of including your e-mail address. I won’t use it for any other purpose than to enter you into my drawing for $10. Every e-mail address will be assigned a number, and then I’ll run a test on random.org. If your number is the one to appear, you win the $10.

I will send you the $10 via Revolution Money Exchange. If you don’t have an account, sign up. RME is essentially PayPal without fees for online transfers. To be open, in the past RME has given a $25 bonus to anyone signing up, and $10 to anyone who refers a new user. As far as I know that promotion ended on May 15, 2008. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m “giving away $10″ by getting 100 people to sign up for the service. I’ve used RME a few times for transactions and it works as advertised — no fees like with PayPal. When I see a business I like that provides value to me, I am going to promote it.

So! Potential to win $10 if you participate in the survey, but you’ve got to have an RME account to win the money. If you’re not interested in yet another online account, that’s cool, please consider participating in the survey regardless.

My free account at SurveyMonkey let’s me only accept 100 survey results, so don’t delay! Click Here to take the survey.

Thanks!

Our Saturday morning routing certainly has changed ever since we got a puppy. I haven’t decided whether or not it is a good thing quite yet.

In the past, it was sleep in until 8am or 9am. Glorious. Catching up on sleep last during the week. The only problem with that is half of the morning is gone. By the time you have breakfast and take a shower, it’s probably 10:30 and Saturday seems to be evaporating.

Contrast that to today. My wife gets up with the puppy at 6am and is done with taking her out and feeding her by 6:15. We’ve been refinishing our dresser (more on that in future posts — we’ve been doing it since March), so she went to the garage to start sanding for the final layer of clear coat. Only problem is we have too coarse sandpaper, so we’ve got to go buy some 220 grit later today.

I get up at 7am — unheard of — and we take Maggie for a long walk. By this point we’re up, and I’m finally awake. We’re buying patio furniture today (hooray!), so we need to clean off the patio. Moving trash out, sweeping, and heck while we’re outside I might as well fertilize the backyard. And pull up weeds.

So I here I sit, 10am on a Saturday morning. Wide awake. Showered. Breakfast (in bed) enjoyed. Backyard fertilized. Weeds pulled. Patio cleaned. Unbelievable. I feel so productive.

And now we’re off to buy that patio furniture. Enjoy your Saturday!

Debt Kid has an interesting article up about what he would tell his 18 year old self if he had the chance. That’s a very interesting take on things and sounded like a great kick off to a new article.

Six years ago I was just about to graduate high school. It’s nuts to think about that as it seems like a terribly long time ago, but at the same time it feels like no time has passed at all.

A Recap of Major Life Events, 2002-2008

• I graduated high school in 2002, and graduated college in December 2005.
• I got engaged October 2005, and married the woman of my dreams in January 2007.
• I’ve worked two real-world career jobs.
• We bought our first house last summer (remind me to write about this at some point).
• We got a dog two weeks ago.

What I Would Tell My 18 Year Old Self

These are in no particular order, lest you think me a cold hearted man.

• Get an internship for every summer between school, even if you have to pay out of pocket.
  • I turned down an internship with BMW USA in New Jersey because it didn’t pay enough to even pay rent up in New Jersey. In hindsight it was a great opportunity, but the program seemed very unorganized (no list of available corporate apartments for interns, etc.). I may have missed the boat with my favorite car company.
• Network more.
  • I was brought up to believe that hard work and good grades were what it took to succeed in life. I’ve learned over the years that a significant portion of life is who you know. It may not be fair, it may be kind of cynical, but it is definitely true. I would network with more people and put the books away more often.
• Be appropriately frugal.
  • I’m definitely pro-frugality. Just don’t let it affect your life. (Psst… take your spouse on a date.)
• Walk in the rain with the one you love.
  • Be silly. It can be fun. Branch out a bit.
• Life is short.
  • You will know people who die young. Your family isn’t getting any younger, either. Call your parents. Call your wife’s parents. Stay in touch with friends.
• Figure out how to get organized.
  • By far one of the most important things you can do. Come up with an organization system and stick to it.
• Get engaged later or marry faster.
  • You and your future wife will both agree waiting 14 months to get married is far too long, you impatient jerk.
• You can do a long distance relationship and make it work.
  • When it becomes a short distance relationship, you will truly appreciate it more. It sucks for now, but stick it out. She’s a winner.
• Don’t forget how to dream and thank God for every day. Repeat: Life is short.
• Take risks. Repeat: Life. Is. Short. Live a little.
  
• In fact, don’t forget to live.
  • You’ll end up writing a personal finance blog and focusing on money a lot. Don’t let it take over your life. Life each day to the fullest. Take her to Brusters. Get ice cream. Rent a movie. Don’t be an old fuddy-duddy.

That wraps it up for now. What if we turned this into a meme?

What would you tell your 18 year old self, Cash Money Life, Being Frugal, and Master Your Card?

Overview

April was my second really good month for No Debt Plan. Thanks to my article about using a Roth IRA to retire with $1,000,000 getting popular on Stumble Upon, I saw another rush of visitors. I didn’t quite beat March’s visitors number, but I’m still very happy overall.

The Monthly Stats (vs. 1 month ago):

• Posts: 51 vs. 43 (18.6% increase)
• Comments/Pingbacks: 175 vs 103 (69.9% increase)
• Visits: 6,578 vs. 7,369 (10.73% decrease)
• Page Views: 10,014 vs.9,636 (3.92% increase)
• RSS Subscribers: 112 vs. 75 (49.33% increase)

I’m very happy with 6,500 coming to visit this blog in the past month… that is over 200 per day. The number I am most happy with is the RSS subscribers. Let’s keep up that growth!

Popular in April:

These posts were popular this past month:

• One Easy Step to Retiring with $1,000,000
• Should You Invest in Visa?
• Reader Question: Roth IRA Minimums?
• The Carnival of Debt Reduction: No Debt Plan Edition
• My First Place Shows Off Poor Decisions
• A Risky Question

Subscribe to No Debt Plan:

Join your fellow readers in subscribing to No Debt Plan. Any help you can provide to me is greatly appreciat. This includes subscribing to the blog, adding me as a favorite on Technorati, and adding me to your del.icio.us account. Here’s how to do a few of those things:

Try it via e-mail…

… or old fashioned RSS:

You could also add me as a favorite on your technorati account:

What’s Coming in May:

• Continuation of the No Debt Plan series (I have slacked off on this and plan to knock out the next two steps this month.)
• More green house/living articles
• A few more Dumb Money articles

Thanks!

Thanks for making this blog the success it is thus far. You’re helping me live out something I truly enjoy doing. If you enjoy this blog, the honest to goodness best thing you can do for me is to e-mail five of your friends and tell them about this blog. Here’s a quick e-mail you could send:

Hey! I’ve discovered a new blog that I enjoy reading and thought you might, too. The blog is No Debt Plan and the author focuses on helping people get and stay out of debt. Why don’t you take a look, or try subscribing to the RSS feed?

Or something like that (maybe that was a bit cheesy for you). And hey, if you’re feeling generous, tell more than five friends!

I turn 24 today. Hooray!

Here’s my birthday wish: to become a very popular personal finance writer. To make money writing here and elsewhere. To have No Debt Plan become very, very popular.

Want to get me something? Here are three things you can do.

• Tell as many people as possible about this blog. Use social bookmarking sites (handy links at the bottom of each post). Even better, individually introduce people to the site. Send them an e-mail and tell them personally about your experience here.
• Help me write better articles. Critique the blog. It hurts, but makes me better.
• Participate. Leave comments. E-mail me. Share.

I’m taking the day off from blogging, so I’ll check back in tomorrow.

Over 100 people read this blog every day.

None of them have anything to say, apparently. Only one comment on my article: Open Lines: Comments, Questions, Critiques. Nothing?

I’m not writing this to complain. I write from genuine concern. We’re obviously not building any sort of community here if no one has anything to say. Positive or negative.

I can’t write better without your help. Is the blog theme ugly? Is the content boring? Do you love coming back? Do you subscribe? Chime in!

Edit: That, or my writing is so perfect no one can find fault in it…!

This blog is reaching new heights every day because of you, the reader.

Now I’m asking a quick favor of you guys and gals out there. Can you let me know how I’m doing? Are you enjoying the articles? Am I focusing on one topic too much? What haven’t I talked about that you want to read more on?

I’m looking for honest critiques and opinions. Naturally, I love everything I write. (Not quite!) So if you’ve got something to say — positive or negative — please share it!

I’d also like to get a few more reader questions. What finance issues are you confused about? What can I help with? You can either leave a comment or e-mail me directly at nodebtplan at gmail dot com.

Again, thanks for stopping by. Here’s what is in store for the rest of this week and next week:

• A discussion on a lawn care mistake I made recently
• How we saved $175 on window treatments (use a Mac… bah dum sch)
• A Net Worth update (just waiting on the mortgage payments to post for accuracy)
• An article about how much house you really buy each month

Cheers!

Overview

March was incredible month for No Debt Plan. My article The Concept That Changed Our Financial Life hit the frontpage of reddit and reached #12!

With reddit came a lot of traffic — over 4,700 visitors in one day. By far the best month I’ve had so far in terms of traffic. Unfortunately, all of that traffic brought some hosting issues which took several days to resolve. I quickly dropped from the front page and into obscurity. Fortunately, even without the reddit traffic I still increased the number of visitors that visited by a healthy margin.

The Monthly Stats (vs. 1 month ago):

• Posts: 43 vs. 30 (43% increase)
• Comments/Pingbacks: 103 vs 57 (80% increase)
• Visits: 7,369 vs. 1,750 (321% increase!)
• Page Views: 9,636 vs. 4,033 (139% increase)
• RSS Subscribers: 75 vs. 28 (167% increase)

I would also like to point out that I peaked at 78 subscribers before reddit came to visit. I hope that bodes well for the future.

Popular in March:

These posts were popular this past month.

• The Concept That Changed Our Financial Life
• Our Cars Cost Us $0.242 per Mile
• Should You Invest in Visa?
• The No Debt Plan: Step Two: Achieve Free Cash Flow
• Mistakes: Procrastination
• Budgeting Tools

Subscribe to No Debt Plan:

Join your fellow readers in subscribing to No Debt Plan.

Try it via e-mail…

… or old fashioned RSS:

You could also add me as a favorite on your technorati account:

What’s Coming in April:

• No April Fool’s jokes
• Continuation of the No Debt Plan series
• Some resources to earn income on the side, as well as some free money resources
• More green house/living articles
• A few more Dumb Money articles

Thanks!

Thanks for making this blog the success it is thus far. You’re helping me live out something I truly enjoy doing. If you enjoy this blog, the honest to goodness best thing you can do for me is to e-mail five of your friends and tell them about this blog. Here’s a quick e-mail you could send:

Hey! I’ve discovered a new blog that I enjoy reading and thought you might, too. The blog is No Debt Plan and the author focuses on helping people get and stay out of debt. Why don’t you take a look, or try subscribing to the RSS feed?

Or something like that (maybe that was a bit cheesy for you). And hey, if you’re feeling generous, tell more than five friends!

You may have noticed No Debt Plan has been down since early Wednesday. I am working on getting this fixed. My apologies — please stick around!

Since it is working right now, I am guessing it is going to go down again for probably another 24 hours. Hopefully I will be surprised.

One of my posts, The Concept that Changed Our Financial Life, is experiencing a bit of reddit effect. Not 10,000 visits or anything like that (not on the front page yet), but over 1,300 2,200 4,100 visits thus far today. That’s 10x 22x 41x more than normal!

You can vote for the post on reddit. I would appreciate as many ups as possible.

For the reddit users, please feel free to stick around, comment, engage in discussion, etc. You can also subscribe via RSS or e-mail.

You can also find out what this blog is all about. A little bit more about me.

Long story short, I write to try and help people get and stay out of debt.

Again, thanks for stopping by!