The budget is on FIRE!

After April is over, I’m really going to need a low-spend month.  This month has been a little bit financially crazy.  I feel like I’ve been a spending fiend!

Okay, so most of these purchases were budgeted for and planned for, but man, when all those things hit at once, it’s pricey!

I’m going on vacation next week (yay!) and realized that I don’t have a decent vacation wardrobe (whoops).  Few purchases there.  Then I decided to bite the bullet and buy the new computer I’ve been planning to buy for the last few months (I went to the dark side and got a Mac).  It was past time – my current computer went through quite a lot in law school, and while I could deal with the letters being rubbed off of the keyboard and the relatively slow speed, the constant shutting down got to be a bit much.  Sure, I could have taken the more frugal route and bought parts, but it was time.  It was a few months earlier than I hoped, but this blogger cannot be without her computer.  You would miss me right?

Right?

I also bit the bullet and picked up some new clothes for work (on sale) and paid my fee to run the Army Ten Miler in October.  Both necessary things, but again, it’s all hitting at once.

So it’s the beginning of the month and I feel like I’ve spent a fortune.  I’m hoping that while on vacation, I can keep from spending too much, and I’m saving a lot by crashing with a friend while I’m gone, but I really want to repay that kindness by paying when we go out to eat and such.  Plus my roommate always brings me the most amazing gifts when she travels – I have to find her something wonderful as a thanks for taking care of my cats while I’m gone.

It’s a little funny to think that I’m sooooo out of control when really, I’m not that much over budget at all, and I know I can keep myself straight for the rest of the month.  But I still think that May might be a month of financial stockpiling.

Megan Smith

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.