For the most part, I knew August wasn’t a great month. My net worth is down almost 0.6%, which really isn’t much, but it’s down rather than up. Looking at the breakdown, the loss in my cash accounts and the loss in my investment accounts are almost exactly equal.
It was a high spending month with the surgery for the cat. Of course, I feel that I’ve been making excuses for my net worth over the past few months, which isn’t really acceptable. I can’t do much about my investments except to continue to contribute to my retirement and be glad that it will be at least 30 years before I need that money. I’ve also gotten a roommate, which should help with the finances, even if she’s only here a month or two.
I know that I’m not going to make my yearly goal to increase my net worth, which is disappointing, but for the rest of the year, I’m altering that goal to “Increase my net worth as much as possible.” And maybe something magical will happen and I will make my goal.
Or maybe I should just buy a lotto ticket.
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.
