Motley Fool Open Community

Have you ever visited or heard of the Motley Fool website?

The Motley Fool is a financial website that has a stated purpose to educate, amuse and enrich.

For me personally, I consider my discovery of the Motley Fool discussion boards to be the turning point in my financial life as that is where I learned the information necessary to eliminate our debt.

Over the years that I have been a member, I have learned so many things and met so many great people while never failing to be both amused and enriched as a result.

Open Community
For the last few years, Motley Fool discussion boards have required a paid membership to be an active participant and there was quite a bit of debate when they made that switch from a free service to a pay service. It really was not a hard decision for me and I paid for my membership.

Just recently I received an email from the folks at Motley Fool with an announcement that they will soon be eliminating the paid memberships and will use an *invite-only* system. Everyone on the Interweb will have access to read the discussion boards but if you want to post your own messages you will be required to be a discussion board member.

Membership
So how do you become a member? The current plan is that all of the people that are currently paying for their membership will receive the new status of being a discussion board member. If you are not currently a member but would like to become one, you will need to be invited by one of the existing members. Back when Google’s Gmail came out they used a similar strategy where once you had an account, you could invite additional people to use the service.

From what I have read, current members will have 20 invitations that they can send out to family, friends or whoever. Those members can then invite additional members, so on and so on. One thing that is not clear right now is if the 20 invitations are per year or for the lifetime of your membership.

Green Light For Current Members
If you currently have a paid membership, you have two choices on how to proceed with regard to the fees that you have already paid. The default option will be that you will receive one year of the Motley Fool Green Light service, which has a value of $79. If you would prefer not to receive the complimentary year of Green Light, you can contact the Fool and request that the remaining balance of your discussion board subscription be refunded to you.

If you already pay for Green Light, they will add a free year to your subscription or you have the same option to have the remaining balance refunded to you.

If you’re asking yourself what exactly is the Green Light service, here is a brief description as provided at the Fool:

Motley Fool Green Light is our flagship personal finance and investing service that focuses on concrete, actionable advice that measurably improves your financial well being — right away. Green Light offers step-by-step instruction on everything from estate planning to refinancing; credit repair to asset allocation. If it affects how you earn, spend, borrow, or invest money, we cover it in Motley Fool Green Light and help you take every money goal from your “to do” list to “done.”

The service offers a monthly 10-page online newsletter written by co-advisors Dayana Yochim and Shannon Zimmerman and a companion website where you can get answers to your money questions by interacting with the service advisors, the dedicated Motley Fool Green Light team and fellow members. This newsletter service has been designed to help you make the most of your money.

My Plans
There have been a few times that I thought about subscribing to the Green Light service to see what they had to offer so I am planning to keep the complimentary subscription rather than ask for a refund. I’ve already received a few emails and will certainly be sharing any information that I find to be valuable.

In the next few weeks the Fool will be implementing this open community and I will have 20 invitations. If you think this is something that you would be interested in receiving, please write a post on your site about why you want an invitation and link back to this post (or you can simply send me an email with the same information but I might be easier to bribe with a link, lol).