9 useful money tips from Get Rich Slowly

Was browsing the web while my code was compiling, and stumbled across this article at GetRichSlowly.org. In case you don't feel like reading the whole thing (and I highly recommend reading the entire article, as well as several of the associated links), here's the 9 tips summarized:

1. Track every penny you spend
2. Develop a budget
3. Optimize your accounts
4. Start an emergency fund
5. Get out of debt
6. Fund your retirement
7. Automate your finances
8. Earn extra money
9. Educate yourself

These are all very good (if somewhat obvious in some cases) tips for getting your finance in order and increasing your overall wealth. Obviously this blog is focused on number 5 - getting out of debt - but that is most definitely not the only subject I'll discuss. I'm also already performing several of the above steps:

• I track all of our spending in Quicken, mostly out of a paranoid fear that someone may have stolen our credit info. I keep track of categories to the best of my ability, and have all our bills entered as recurring payments. I've recently begun to use this as a twice-a-month checkpoint to determine where our funds our at. One of the things that got this whole effort started was a daunting lack of knowledge regarding our financial situation - at any point in time, it was almost a guess more than a certainty that any given transaction at the grocery store, or while grabbing a bite, would be successful. Since I've started the budgets and keeping an eye on debt, I've been a lot more confident with these situations - and it's only been about a month!
  
• I've got two unofficial budgets for tracking purposes, and one budget I'll be discussing with the wife that we'll use to actively control our spending habits. The tracking budgets are just tools I use for the moment to keep myself on the ball, to get a general feeling of where we stand in terms of our financial situation. The new budget will actually be geared toward having foreknowledge of where all our money will go, and will come with guidelines for how to function under the budget. Somewhere along the line I developed an obsession with documentation, and I'm working on describing this whole thing in a doc that will probably become a blog post somewhere down the line.
  
• I'm constantly educating myself on money matters by browsing finance blogs in my free time - it's how we saved 10% off market when we purchased our home as a foreclosure. The Housing Bubble Blog was one I used to mitigate my frustrations with my life as a rental during the housing insanity of the past several years, and has been a wealth of information and resources.
  
• We're both working towards funding our retirement. It's not a lot at the moment, as we're both kind of focused on debt reduction, but it's also not zero and every little bit helps. I'm matching my company's 1% at the moment, and increase that amount by 1% every may after merit increases go through.
  
• We're also establishing an emergency fund. One of our primary problems, as most homeowners know, is that within the first year of homeownership thousands of dollars worth of expenses can come out of nowhere (especially in a house like ours that was vacant for 18 months before the purchase). With the new budget, we'll be putting away at least $250 towards savings every month, which should give us a comfortable $1,000 emergency fund within five months, and at least a month's worth of expenses by the end of the year (if all goes according to plan, that is).
  

I view my debt as a beast, and to pull unashamedly from Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, I'm constantly looking for knowledge bullets that I can load my brain with, so as to more effectively bust a cap in that bitch. Or something.