A certain popular blog that I once read rather faithfully has jumped on board selling “premium” content to his readers, ones that he used to respect. Instead, readers are now nothing more than paying customers. Look, you guys made my blog the success it is today. To transform that into an apparent attempt to turn a quick buck off of you to read the content you guys should expect from The Simple Dollar for free.
Let me make this clear: I will never sell an ebook or a PDF on The Simple Dollar that contains any content that I haven’t given away completely for free. In fact, the only time you’ll ever see me mentioning anything I produce that you can’t get for free sitting there at your computer is if I ever write a book – that might require you to make a trip to your local library to get for free (or perhaps to amazon or to your bookstore if you’d like to keep your own copy). I might, on occasion, bundle up a bunch of posts into a single PDF and put that out there for a nominal fee – a dollar or two – but I’ve only done that once and I did it in response to requests from readers. I have too much respect for you to expect you to pay me money for something you should receive naturally as a reader of this site – you guys really are the reason this site is any success at all, and to suddenly start expecting payment for my content would be a cold slap in your face.
Yo Quiero Aye Carumba! The cutesy title hides a really serious article here – a woman was fired after thirty years of working for Taco Bell largely because, even though she had just been receiving the natural raises over time in the Taco Bell system, she was getting paid more than they wanted to pay her. What does this mean for you? Treat yourself as a business – and realize that in today’s world, employees should expect no loyalty from their employer. Argue all you want, but this is the precedent that corporate America is setting. (@ mighty bargain hunter)
How Much Do You Tell Your Parents? For me, I’ve found it’s directly connected to how good my financial state is – as it’s gotten better, I’ve been much more willing to talk about it with my folks. (@ make love not debt)
The Many Reasons – Besides Frugality – To Do It Yourself I’m a big fan of doing it myself, even if it means some extra work sometimes. (@ wise bread)
The Simple Dollar Retro: Financial Paperwork Bankruptcy: Should It Be Done And If So, How? If you have a huge pile of unsorted financial documents, bill statements, and so on, and are really afraid to dig in and get them organized, it might make sense to just start over from scratch. Here are some thoughts and suggestions on the topic.