Maybe I won't cancel my subscription just yet

A few months ago I started following the blog - Get Rich Slowly by JD Roth. I was intrigued by the honest, common sense approach to getting out of debt and building wealth. As everyone knows, the world wide web is full of people trying to convince you that wealth is just a few clicks away - anyone been contacted by a lost Uncle from Nigeria who wants to deposit Millions in Euro lottery winnings into your bank account - so JD's slow, long term approach was a welcome relief.

I also figured that any blog worthy of praise in Money magazine and that has over 79,000 subscribers must not be all that bad (that's only 78,994 more than Never Mondays).

At first I was pretty excited and read every post as it came out, but I eventually started losing interest because, among other things I was too lazy to implement a lot of what he was doing, and I just wasn't finding a wealth of information or new ideas that would tell me what I don't already know - even if I don't do them.  Thinking about it now as I write, I guess that's the point :)

But anyway, today I logged on and there was a post that was exactly what I've been looking for.  A summary of some basic principles expressed as 25 Rules of Thumb for Financial Matters.  I knew a few of them like your mortgage should be no more than 28% of your total debt and when you get a raise, you should take the extra money and save/invest it and you'll never miss it.  But I had never heard that your emergency fund should be equal to X months of expenses where X is the current unemployment rate.  There are 22 more great ideas in that article and I encourage everyone to check them out.  Thanks JD for compiling the list - I know some of my readers love a good list!