It’s Monday morning, and you know what that means. Time for the Carnival of Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality! My post on credit reports is in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance. Check it out, it’s a Valentine’s Day edition!
I’m still going through the Carnival, and haven’t gotten a chance to look at the Festival yet, but here are some of my favorite posts so far:
- Struggling on a Six-Figure Income – I live in the Washington, D.C. area, and am well aware that six-figures here means something very different than six-figures in the midwest where I grew up. The discussion in the comments on this post is fascinating.
- What Women Wish Men Knew About Money – I absolutely agree with number 3. Day to day actions do speak so much louder than gifts!
- How the Federal Reserve works and why the interest rate on my savings account dropped – I was frustrated by the recent rate drops on my ING Direct account. This helps explain why it happened. Doesn’t ease my frustration though!
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
