I have an addition to my travel tips post. When flying anywhere, be sure to bring at least one extra set of clothing, and plan to fly home with that outfit still clean.
I spent a long weekend at my parents’ house as a Father’s Day surprise for my dad. My flight out was delayed a bit, but nothing too bad. However, my flight home today got cancelled due to “weather in D.C.” Really, I think there were just storms possible, and the flight wasn’t full, so they opted to cancel rather than delay. I could still have gotten home tonight, but it would have been around 2 am by the time I got back to my apartment. I wasn’t going to be able to get to work by 7:30 anyway. Not if I wanted to function. So I opted to take a flight tomorrow, get another evening with my family, and not worry about work. Thankfully, I have the vacation time available, a very flexible boss, and will likely be able to make up the hours anyway.
But the problem is that I didn’t have any extra clothing with me! So I’m doing laundry right now. Not a problem, since I’m with my family. But if I were stuck in a hotel overnight, this would be a bigger issue. No one wants to fly next to the stinky girl, after all.
Content will return on Wednesday. Wish me luck getting home tomorrow.
Megan is a 40-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.