7 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

I got tagged by a new blogger friend, Trevor over at Financial Nut (great title!).  The rules?

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So here we go.  Seven facts.

1.  I have an obsession with pens and paper, and this is probably why I have an English degree and a law degree.  My educational years were filled with reams and reams of paper.  And yet I’m also a techology geek.  I love my computer and online blogs and making spreadsheets and keeping files and files of documents.  It’s a strange conflict.  Paper journal or computer journal?  Paper calendar or online calendar?  Paper to-do list or online to-do list?  In fact, writing this entry was one of the things on my paper to-do list, written in pretty green pen.

2.  I love college football.  I’m a Notre Dame graduate, so it sort of comes with the territory, but my love extends beyond my alma mater.  If I turn on the tv and discover college football is on, I immediately get sucked in.  I don’t care who the team is (of course, sometimes it’s just a team I have to cheer against – sorry Boston College grads).  But this doesn’t extend to pro football.  Oh, I enjoy watching, but it’s just not the same.  It makes no sense.

3.  I’m a little terrified that people I know are going to find this blog.  I had a bad experience with an online journal back in the late 90’s, in the days when blogs weren’t cool.  Therefore, I keep things a little bit vague to protect what little privacy I do have left.

4.  I’ve never been a big video game person.  I think it’s because we weren’t allowed to have a Nintendo growing up.  My parents didn’t want us spending all of our time sitting in front of the tv.  I think that we’re all better for it.  We grew up in a very safe neighborhood, and spent our summer days out adventuring, riding bikes through the fields, playing baseball in the front yard (making a giant tree second base always resulted in injuries).  I’m also terrible at video games.  I love to play, especially with friends, but I’m the girl who always crashes in Mario Kart in about 30 seconds.

5.  I really love frozen grapes.  I am eating them as I type this.

6.  I grew up in Midwestern farm country, and all I ever wanted was to get out.  Now I find myself missing the simplicty.  Sure, the museums were harder to get to, but sometimes I think the people were nicer.  That said, everyone my age living in my hometown seems to be already married with 2.5 kids.  Clearly, that’s not where I want to be in my life.  Not yet.

7.  I am always amazed at how the internet has changed our lives.  I can look up a restaurant review, get directions to the restaurant, check the weather and the news from anywhere in the world, simultaneously chat with friends in Australia and England for free, find a recipe for anything, and so much more.  I wonder how we functioned without it.  And yet, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live a more carefree, simpler life.  Knowledge is power, but ignorance is bliss.

I’ve never been all that good at rules, plus I struggled to pick just seven so I tag all of you! And if you want to respond in a blog post, let me know, and I’ll link it here.

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.