People, Services, & Products I Love

I only endorse people, services, & products that have either radically improved my life or that I use daily in my business.  Some are free.  Some cost money.  All of them are amazing.

Jump straight to a specific category:


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Personal Finance Guides/Tools
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Unautomate Your Finances:  A simple, passionate approach to money!

Of course, I’m going to love my very first premium guide, Unautomate Your Finances.  It’s ridiculous cheap and contains several bonuses, including half hour interviews with Leo Babauta and J.D. Roth.

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PocketSmith – Budgeting & Tracking Income/Expenses

PocketSmith

I love PocketSmith.  I love the concept and I love the people behind it.  The calender-based interface allows me to tangibly connect in a way other software hasn’t.  The forecasting mindset also pushes me to focus on projecting the future, rather than just analyzing my past data.

I primarily enjoy tracking and budgeting on paper.  But because I want to share our finances publicly, I need to log it in an online software.  PocketSmith works amazing for us (head over and see for yourself).


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Lifestyle Design Guides/Gear

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Chris Guillebeau’s “Unconventional Guides”

No one source has impacted my blogging, travel, and business more than Chris Guillebeau.  He’s a mentor of mine and I’m constantly modeling his example.

Chris also includes not only text, but audio and video in most of his premium content.  This makes the content not only comprehensive, but entertaining.

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Frequent Flyer Master is a full e-book, a 20-minute audio, a 4-page Priceline specific guide  on the art of hacking airline miles.

Chris also guarantees that you will earn at least 25,000 air miles in the first 90 days or get and instant refund.  It’s my favorite product to date and I’ve talk about it in more detail in my Travel Hacking for Noobs post.

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Working For YourselfWorking for Yourself drastically changed my blogging direction (for the better) by convincing me of the power of the ‘very small business’ concept.

It’s a 53-page ebook, 3 separate 25-minute audio sessions, and includes a special SEO companion.  This is Chris’ flagship product and was what converted me from blog reader to rabid AoNC-fanboy!

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Social MediaSocial Web contains the most genuine and effective approach to social media that I know of.  Chris has had a huge influence not only in my blogging, but in my use of videos, twitter, facebook, and e-mail, as well.

I’ve already wrote an extensive post on my own journey in social media, including a review of this guide.  Check it out for more information!


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Blogging Products/Services
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Thesis – Premium Wordpress Theme

Thesis has been a lifesaver for me.  After two weeks of trying to save money with a free theme, I took a chance and purchases Thesis almost a year ago now.  I strongly believe it was one of the best decision I have ever made regarding this blog.  It’s saved me a ridiculous amount of time, money, and energy.

Using the support forums and widely available free tutorials, I made nearly 100% of changes to my site for the first 9 months.  While I hired help for my most recent redesign, it was still all done within Thesis so that I could easily make minor changes myself if desired.  I love this theme.

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SEOScribe – Search Engine Optimization Plug-in

For the first year or so, I hardly worried about SEO at all.  I focused on producing great content and using some of Thesis’ basic optimization was even able to rank very well for a couple search terms.  Recently, though, I’ve decided to take it up a notch with the SEOScribe plugin from the same people who designed Thesis.

Scribe is a plugin that runs an analysis on the actual content of the post and provides step-by-step instructions on what actions could help.  I’m not an SEO expert and this works great for reminding me to cover the basics before I post.  I’ve also been going back to old articles and running tests to see what I can fix.  Loving it so far.

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IvyLime Designs – Affordable Logo Design/Graphics

Logo Design

Dustin Koester, of IvyLime Designs, has done nearly all of the custom graphics and logos you see on Man Vs. Debt, my twitter page, and the complete layout/design of my premium guides.  Dustin’s a lifelong friend and has put together several packages for fans of the site to customize their own projects.

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Andrew Norcross – Wordpress Tweaking, Hacking, & Tech Consulting

Andrew Norcross is my go-to guy for any custom tweaks, hacks, or plugins for Wordpress.  Even more important than that, he’s the first person I call or e-mail when “stuff hits the fan.”  He’s prompt, knowledgeable, and has a reputation as one of the most helpful people in the blogging world.

If you have a technical issue, Norcross either knows the solution or knows where to find it.


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Must-Read Books!

Like many of you, I love reading books.  Several of them have really changed my life in one way or another.  Using Amazon, I’ve collect a sample of my favorite books below.  I’ve included some old and new, trying to provide a good mix.

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