Donna Freedman

Veteran personal finance journalist Donna Freedman has been a college dropout, a single mom, a newspaper reporter in Chicago and Alaska, a writing coach, and a late-in-life university student. She has also picked tomatoes, worked on a chicken farm, managed an apartment building, inspected and packed bottles in a glass factory, babysat, cleaned houses, mystery-shopped, set type, and sold doughnuts, movie tickets, fresh Jersey produce and, when things got bad, her own blood.

While getting divorced in her late 40s she went back to school and helped to support a disabled adult daughter by working a handful of part-time jobs, incurring ZERO debt to earn a degree from the University of Washington. Her survival skills so impressed an MSN Money editor that he hired her to write the Smart Spending and Frugal Nation blogs, as well as a column called Living With Less. She also has her own playground for words, Surviving and Thriving (www.donnafreedman.com).

After an 18-year career in print journalism Donna took to the freelance life, writing for numerous magazines, newspapers and PF websites. Her work has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Women's Sports Foundation, the National College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the Association for Women in Communications and the Society of American Travel Writers.

Each year she speaks at the Financial Blogger Conference; after being asked once too often "How can I become a better writer?" while at the conference, she created the Write A Blog People Will Read online course (WriteABlogPeopleWillRead.com/testimonials).

Donna lives in Anchorage, Alaska. If you're headed up that way, e-mail her at SurvivingAndThriving@live.com.