As I mentioned earlier, one of my goals this year is to give more money to charity. But I want to be sure that I’m giving to charities that are worthwhile and perhaps have some personal meaning to me. Over the weekend, I was surfing around the Donors Choose website. Donors Choose is an organization that collects requests from teachers and then helps those teachers get projects funded. Teachers submit a proposal for a project, Donors Choose reviews that project, and then the proposals are posted online for donors to view and choose. You can donate enough to fund an entire project or you can donate a small amount. Every little bit helps. Every donor gets a thank you e-mail from the teacher, and if you donate over $100 or donate the last bit of money to fully fund a project, you get a thank you packet from the classroom.
I donated to a program to help pay for supplies for a penpal program. I had penpals all throughout grade school, and I just recently found some of those penpals on Facebook. I loved getting mail as a kid, and I love that the snail mail letter still exists somewhere.
And then, after I donated, I wondered if there were any personal finance related projects available. And there are! So I put together a giving page with some personal finance projects that still need to be funded. Want to help me fund these projects? I’ll be donating over the next few weeks (having made my donation before setting up the page). Join me!
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.
What a great idea! My donation this month may have to go to one of these projects.