As I put together my monthly assets and liabilities table on Tuesday, I thought I was April Fooling myself! I was hoping for a month where I didn’t lose too much money.
I actually got very excited when I started entering numbers and realized that for the month of March, I was going to end up with a net worth increase!
Ok, so it’s not much. My net worth went up 0.06%. The increase was due to my cash accounts, as my investments dropped a bit, but not as much as I had feared. I’m hoping this new trend continues.
One of my 2008 goals had to do with a percentage net worth increase. So far for 2008, my net worth is still down 2.58%. Not great, but it could be worse. It could be much worse.
Here’s to April also moving in an upward direction!
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.
Awesome job! I say any amount of $ in the green is better than any in the red, that’s for sure 🙂
i applaud you for staying on top of it!