Happy Independence Day! Hope everyone is celebrating with a BBQ and maybe some evening fireworks.
Just a quick post of articles from my friends at Pecuniary Associates today, then off to some holiday celebrating.
Trevor has been MIA for a while but he’s back with a vengeance! Well, he’s back anyway. I like that on Twitter, people were discussing his possible imprisonment. “Where’s Trevor? Maybe he’s in jail.”
Karen’s husband Tony wrote a two part article about essential tools for the frugal kitchen. I definitely need to rethink my kitchen utensils, so this is a very useful post.
Penelope gives us a delicious looking cold noodle recipe. I haven’t tried it out yet, but it looks like a quick and easy meal for a hot summer day.
And one more link. Check out this post at Lifehacker for some incredible fireworks desktop wallpapers. You can get your fireworks fix every day!
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.