Last night, my roommate and I splurged and got a pizza after we ran a 5K race in the rain. It was awesome. Restaurant pizza is such a treat when you don’t buy it often.
And now, a quick set of links from the Pecuniary Associates.
- Is Hyperinflation Looming in America’s Economic Future? – An entry from Alex this time, and a slightly scary one at that.
- Beauty doesn’t have to be expensive – The beauty industry is amazing in its ability to convince us that we need a ridiculous number of creams and potions and products. Resist the urge to splurge!
- No Air-Conditioning Summer Part 1 – How It Started: No-Heat Winters – I could handle the no AC, I think, but no heat? I would probably get more exercise, running around to try to stay warm.
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.
No heat and no AC? interesting, but not about to try it. Too many small children. And it would get just a little bit colder than in the Mojave desert. (BRRR!) We have plans in place if we lost power (not unheard of in OK!), but the whole winter would be too much of a stretch for me. This past winter we had a full week of sub-freezing temps.
I would be curious to know whether most of these anti-AC folks live west of the Rockies. It’s one thing when you have dry summers, and can set up some kind of water-evaporation gig to cool the air, or get by with fans. Quite another matter if you live in a place where summer is sometimes or always humid. And it’s not just about comfort. If you let the moisture hang around and have mold allergies, you will spend the summer sick; if you have lots of books or other items that are susceptible to mold and mildew, they will suffer damage. So there’s more to the AC than just cooling the air.
Not that that’s a bad idea either. As a transplanted Southerner I came to realize that most of the news stories we hear about the elderly dying of heat stroke in their homes occur up North. In the South, AC is not an option for the vast majority of people; in the North, you’re lucky to find a place built in the 1970s or earlier that has it installed, and then half the time it’s a wall or window unit instead of central–and that makes a difference too.
I wish people weren’t so stubborn about solar energy. We probably can’t rely on it as a primary energy source in much of the country, but it would come in handy during the summer months as a backup to help reduce the financial and ecological impact of air conditioning, not to mention cutting down on smog considerably.