No Debt Plan is about getting and staying out of debt with a plan. Kevin, the author, is passionate about budgeting, saving for the future, and using goals to reach financial freedom. You can subscribe to his blog by RSS or email.
This interview is part of a new feature he’s developed called Subscriber Swap Saturday. The basic idea is to get the subscribers of one blog to subscribe to the other blog for at least a week, just to try it out. After a week if you don’t find that blogger’s content enticing, drop it. The hope is that over time you will find several writers that you weren’t familiar with who provide meaningful content to you. You can read more about Subscriber Swap Saturday at his blog, and you can read his interview with me here.
1. How did you get your name and what made you start blogging?
I made the decision to start a personal finance blog and sat around thinking of what I thought might be a catchy name. Originally I wanted to integrate the word green because I thought the blog might have an environmental twist, but ended up focusing solely on finance for the blog title.
I started blogging because I found myself hanging out at other personal finance blogs leaving comments, or on forums helping people. I figured if I liked this stuff enough to go to all of these different places to share my knowledge, I might just like writing about it.
2. What do you do in real life and how’d you get started?
I am a recruiter in the information technology field. I got started based off of a phone call because my resume was posted — they found me instead of me finding them.
3. What is the reason you blog about personal finance?
I think so many people out there really need help, and they don’t know where to turn. Their parents generation never learned about finances, and that unfortunate ignorance was passed down through the family tree. I honestly find finances to be pretty simple, but I understand most don’t. So I write for those people — to help them understand why they should have a budget and pay off debt.
4. What were your 3 biggest personal finance mistakes?
Back in college I had a car that I poured a decent amount of money into (modifications, etc.). That money would have been better “spent” in a savings account. Other than that I would say I sometimes don’t have enough fun with our money. We each get an allowance off of our budget and I let mine pile up — I currently have several hundred dollars that I’m not sure what I want to do with because I don’t really love spending money.
5. Is your spouse as actively involved in finances as you are and how do you deal with it?
She definitely is involved, but not as heavily as I am. We are on the same page as to what our budget is for each category and things like that. We’ll sit down together once every week or two weeks to go over the category balances and make sure we are on the same page.
6. How long do you think this current economic situation will last for and how do you propose dealing with it?
I have no idea and I don’t think anyone could ever know how. A piece of me wants capitalism to do its job and let the dumb banks that lent money to people without documentation fail. A part of me wants those people to be foreclosed on even if it would affect the value of my home. But I understand there is a big cost to doing those things, perhaps bigger than what we are doing.
In reality I think we have a situation very similar to what happened in Sweden in the 90s. They did the right thing by nationalizing the largest banks, splitting them individually into good banks and bad banks, and then absorbing the bad banks into one gigantic bad bank. This got the crap off of their balance sheets and let them start lending money again. There is talk we will consider doing this now, but we’ve already spent so much thus far… this should have been first in my opinion.
7. What was your best personal finance decision?
Tough — either learning how to budget in Excel or having a discussion with my then girlfriend about finances (got us on the same page permanently).8. What’s your biggest pet peeve about personal finance?
I really don’t understand why people spend more than they earn. Or why they don’t save any money for a rainy day. Or why they assume home prices
always go up. Or why there isn’t much personal responsibility in any aspect of our culture, especially when it comes to finance.Just to name a few.
9. Where do you see yourself in 1, 5, and 10 years?
This is a good set of questions, but man I really hate it. In one year I’m sure we will still be in our home, our bank accounts will hopefully be larger, and I’ll be done with my MBA. In 5 years we are hoping to have just had our first kid (plus additional progress on the saving and retirement front). 10 years is a long way out, not sure about that one!10. Tell me something unusual about yourself.
I starred in my high school’s production of Oklahoma! as Ali Hakim, the Persian Peddler.
I am most impressed by Kevin’s obvious musical and acting abilities! I wonder if he’s ever done it again? Head on over to No Debt Plan and check it out! Thanks to Kevin for giving me the opportunity to reach out to more readers!
LAL
1 response so far ↓
1 frugalCPA // Feb 21, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Hey – I was in Oklahoma in high school, too, and Ali Hakim was kind of my nemesis (I was Will Parker). But Kevin and I are on good terms, so there’s nothing to see here. Move along.
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