New Money Saving Method – A Roommate!

I’ve been kind of out of the blogging world for the past week.  I had a big presentation to give for work (which went well, thank you very much) and I was working on cleaning my apartment.  Why?  Because I’ve decided to get a roommate!  Sort of, anyway.

I have a friend who has moved to town and was looking for a place to stay possibly for a short time, possibly for longer.  I have space that I don’t really use efficiently.  And it is always nice to have a friend around, someone to hang out with and chat with and cook meals with from time to time.  And given the state of the economy, I can definitely use someone to help out with the rent.

We’re not sure how long she’s staying, so we’re just going month by month right now.  What that means is that I’ve been cleaning out the room for her arrival, which is something that needed to happen.  I’ve gotten rid of at least five bags and boxes of things that I had held onto for no apparent reason.  And she’s working on getting moved in, and she’ll be deciding around the end of every month whether or not she’s staying another month.  Unless something amazing comes up with a shorter commute or we decide we hate each other, we both think she’ll be here til next summer.

Some people would freak at the uncertainness.  I’m usually one of those people, but I’m surprisingly ok with all of this.  I’m not sure why, exactly.  It might just be that I realize that I need to clean out that room and the idea of her paying me for even one month of rent will do wonders for my finances after the month of pet expenses gone wild.  Plus I’ve missed having her around and so far, we’ve been having a lot of fun.  I hope she decides to stay.  Not just for the financial reasons, but for the social reasons as well.

Megan Smith

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.