The upward trend continues! In May, my Net Worth increased 1.3%. I’m definitely pleased, but for the most part, this was due to investments. I definitely feel like May was a big spending month, which was not the goal. I paid for some dental work, which put a dent in my medical account, and I also purchased plane tickets for Christmas. Yes, Christmas. As with last year, I like to get things done early. I signed up to run a not-so-cheap half-marathon too. Which means I should probably be saving to pay for that trip.
So again this month, I’m going to try to reign in the spending. I have already bought yet another set of plane tickets, this time for a wedding in August, but I’m hoping to make that the last big purchase for the month. I need to keep growing my accounts with both deposits and interest, not just interest gains.
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.
