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 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 by unsubscribing with no cost or obligations. 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 get out of debt blog, as well as his interview with me.

1. If you go rewind the clock back 3 years, what personal finance decisions would you do differently?

Three years ago I was just about to change jobs - and I would have told myself to stay the course. I would have also been on the 6 month countdown to our wedding. We didn't have an extravagant event, so no changes there.

The real change would probably come two years ago when we bought our home. Just like everyone else out there I am wishing we had waited - but not necessarily just for financial reasons. I wasn't ignorant enough to think that home prices only went up. Not at all. We even thought we might want to stay here for a while, but the call to move closer to our aging parents is really pulling on our hearts these days. Being not even two years into the mortgage doesn't make that easy even as we pay it down with additional payments.

2. What are your favorite personal finance resources out there?

I like Money Magazine for the variety it offers. It isn't too academic - which some might see as a flaw - but it does hit on the main points month after month. For $12 or whatever it is a year I don't think you could find anything better in the "real" publishing business. In terms of blogs I love too many to mention. Ramit Sethi's IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com and JD Roth's Get Rich Slowly are a few of my many, many favorites.

3. Which is likely to make you financially free the fastest - luck, hard work or smart planning? Why?

A combination of the last two. Hard work does pay off, but smart planning makes hard work go much further. It's the difference between A.) planning to build a brick building by hand and carrying the bricks individually from the quarry to the build site one by one and B.) using a wheelbarrow to move a large pile of bricks to the job sit in batches.

I'm not sure that is the best analogy, but I hope the point is made. Smart planning leverages hard work for superior results. You can plan really well, but if you don't have the effort to back it up you will not see results. The opposite is true. If you're working hard in the wrong direction it isn't going to do you much good.

4. From a blogging perspective, what have you found the best in terms of creating revenue and increasing readership of your blog?

In terms of revenue I am completely shooting in the dark. I avoided ads for a long time which turns out to be a silly decision. You might as well have ads the entire time - readers get used to them. Now that I've added them my income, naturally, has increased.

I've been trying to increase my readership in two ways. First, doing things like these interviews gets more exposure for both bloggers. Here's to hoping your readers like my blog and come visit! Second, I am trying to increase the number of guest posts I submit to "big" blogs. The more exposure, the better.

5. Where do you think the American economy will be 5 to 10 years from now in a global context?

Let me start by saying that I have no idea -- I'm not an economist. I would say America will not the powerhouse it currently is in the world economy. I see so many problems in our country -- looming deficits that have to be paid back, the devaluing of the dollar, sky-rocketing health care costs, social security and other government programs running out of money. We've got a lot on our plate.

That having been said America won't go quietly into the night. Our nation is built on innovation. And much of our "decline" will be attributed to the rise of other countries like China and India. China and India are both four times our size in population. As they continue to modernize and those consumers start spending money... look out. Talk about a potential for a hot economic region.

But as those countries go up, even if we hold our current position, we will drop back a little bit. I hope our leaders can see the errors in their ways and will clip spending to eliminate the deficit quickly.

...I'm not holding my breath.

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