Happy St. Patrick's Day - Counting My Pennies

I hope you’re wearing green today. Otherwise, watch out for punches and pinches! (I have never understood that tradition, so you are safe from me if you are wearing your favorite pink sweater today.)

Growing up in an Irish-American household, we have always celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with the wearin’ o’ the green and a big dinner of corned beef and cabbage. I’m down with the green, but the roommate is out of town, and it seemed a bit silly to make corned beef and cabbage just for myself.

St. Patrick’s Day is also associated with money in a number of ways. I’m not sure how a lot of these supersititions and stories started, but I find it interesting that luck is often equated with a large sum of money. The most obvious example of this is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Many have heard of the tradition of a bride putting a penny or a sixpence in her shoe for her wedding, but this is also common with an Irish penny, as it is said to lead to prosperity.

One of my favorite superstitions is that if your palm itches, you will be getting money, but if your elbow itches, you will be changing beds. Depending on your situation, the latter could be considered lucky or unlucky!

On this very lucky day, let’s hear about your money superstitions? If you see a penny on the ground, do you pick it up and believe that “all day long you’ll have good luck?” What if it’s tails up? Still lucky, or very unlucky?

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.

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