Yesterday, I attempting to reorganize my desk at work and was browsing through the office supply catalog. Office supplies are my downfall. I love fancy pens and pencils and desk accessories and all sorts of things. I have to be very careful when I go into an office supply store, especially if it’s a fancy office supply store. After all, office supplies are useful. You will always need pens and paper right?
Wrong. Not when you’ve stocked up as much as I have over the years!
Do you have a shopping vice? Shoes maybe? Books? DVDs? Bags of flour?
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.
bananas 🙂 which have NOW, unfortunately, gone from like 80cents to 97 cents @ Union Station in DC!! wtf?