Carnival is up!

My post on Continuing to Simplify is included in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance. Lots of great posts included, as always, so be sure to check it out.

Here are some that caught my eye:

• Stop Complaining About Gas Prices – It’s true, there’s not a lot we can do about it except work on tightening the budget to pay for the added expense.
• Five Things Indiana Jones Can Teach Us About Personal Finance – I love Indiana Jones. I love personal finance. Win.
• 26 Ways to Make Extra Money – I can’t say I agree with all of these suggestions, but there are a few good ideas in here.
• I am a phantom power ninja – I admit, I live in an apartment building where electricity, gas, and water are included in my rent. So I’m not as good as I should be about watching for power wasting. Even though it won’t save me money, I still should attempt to better conserve for environmental reasons.
• Still Hungry With Food Stamps – Looking at my food budget, I think that $280 would cover me and a child for the month here in the D.C. area, but I’m also good about watching for sales and using coupons. Not everyone has the time for that, nor does everyone always buy the most economical things. It’s especially hard with kids, who can be picky about what they eat.
• What Do You Think of Bankruptcy? – An interesting look at bankruptcy.
• Certificates of Deposit – Don’t Bother Unless… – I do think that putting a chunk of your emergency fund into CDs isn’t a bad plan, especially if you use a short, 6 month CD. The point of an emergency fund is that you shouldn’t need to use it unless a big emergency happens, and if you put it in a CD that’s easy enough to redeem early (I use ING Direct), you’re only really risking a loss of a few dollars and the odds are good you won’t need the emergency fund at all.
• Wants vs. Needs – Most of the time, I’m pretty good about this. I have a big list of “wants” that I continually add to, and often find that things that I wanted a month ago are things I don’t really want anymore.
• $300 Monthly Passive Income by Year End – I’ve never thought of making a passive income goal or even a “side” income goal (because I don’t know that things like surveys and mystery shopping can really be considered “passive”). Maybe something I should look into!
• When do parents hold the financial hammer? – I have mixed feelings about this. As a kid, I had a bank account, but needed my parents to access it, because this was in the days of bank books and pre-ATM. To this day, my mom’s name is still on one of my accounts, though it’s an account that sits dormant for the most part. But a friend of mine had his bank account drained by his father in order to save the family business (that was failing due to his father’s awful bookkeeping), and suddenly, he had no college fund whatsoever. Interesting discussion.

Megan Smith

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.