About the Authors
Madison DuPaix, owner and chief editor
Madison started My Dollar Plan in 2007. She began investing 14 years ago at age 16 and has been a saver all her life. Her favorite hobby is personal finance. Besides investing and saving she also likes to focus on taxes and retirement plans.
She enjoys helping others learn about finances. She volunteers her time to many friends and family researching their money situations, answering questions and setting them up on various financial plans. Madison is also the founder of a local investment club. To learn more about her background, see Q&A: Getting to Know Madison.
You can also find Madison at About.com as the Kids & Money Guide focused on teaching children about money management. She and her husband have three young children at home.
Kate, assistant and contributor
Kate is a contributing writer who has a huge interest in personal finance. After graduating college in 2007, she began reading everything she could about managing her money and discovered she really enjoyed learning about budgeting, saving, investing, taxes and more. She is now happy to be putting that knowledge to use by researching and writing articles for My Dollar Plan as well as developing a financial plan of her own.
She currently lives in Chicago and works as a Marketing Analyst. In her free time, she enjoys reading, working out, cooking, and watching college football.
Amanda Grossman, contributor
Amanda L. Grossman was born and raised on a dairy farm in Lancaster County, PA. Being around the Pennsylvania Dutch, working in the muck, and living under the same roof as her depression-era grandfather engrained the value of frugality in her.
Working in the muck also made Amanda curious and inquisitive of other places, and she dreamed of studying abroad. For three years she mucked horse stalls, worked at her parents’ farm stand selling pumpkins, and milked cows in order to save up the $1600 it took for a summer in Burgos, Spain. Upon arrival, she felt that the country was just not exotic enough.
In college, Amanda spent a semester in London, England working as a Hansard Scholar in the British Parliament for the Welsh Plaid Cymru party, and then she flew directly to the place she dreamt up as being the most exotic in the world: Japan. While studying economics, government and the language, she met her future fiancé, Paul, a cryptologist in the Navy. She graduated from Washington College in 2005 summa cum laude with a degree in International Studies and Environmental Studies.
Amanda currently works as an environmental investigator for the State of Texas, and lives in Houston, TX with her cat, Lyla, and her fiancé, Paul. She writes a personal finance blog called Frugal Confessions and is a featured blogger at the Houston Chronicle.
Jill, contributor
Jill grew up in Texas, graduated from college in 2007 and is currently working in the DC metro area. Jill developed a passion for personal finance when she discovered a few personal finance blogs about 18 months ago. Since then, she has stopped spending every dollar of her paycheck without knowing where it was going, and has instead paid off debt, tracked her spending judiciously, and saved over 20% of every paycheck.
Jill recently completed a 9-month certificate program in financial planning and will take the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) exam in November. After that she hopes to become a full-time financial planner. In addition to finance, Jill enjoys reading for pleasure, reality TV, and watching her alma mater’s basketball team. This is her first foray into the blogosphere.
