A Musical Carnival - Counting My Pennies

Carnival of Personal Finance is up. I really like this week’s theme. I now have Cruel Summer running through my head.

Some links I enjoyed:

A Tale of Two Budgets – A comparison between a French budget and an American budget.
One PB&J a day bring a home within reach? – Interesting discussion. (Also, I love PB&J)
Reward Credit Cards: Ripoff or Real Deal? – We all know I love my rewards card.
Is your car an asset or a liability? – I don’t include my car value in my net worth.
A Prosper Loan that has gone bad – It’s things like this that make me lean away from using Prosper.
Subscription Math – I have a tendency to sign up for magazine subscriptions because “It’s only $12 for the year!” I’m deciding what subscriptions to not renew when that year is up. Just because it’s cheap doesn’t make it worth it.

I’m still reading posts, so this is by no means a complete list. Check it out yourself!

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.

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