Pretty much no change in my net worth over the last month. It went up 0.13%. Not much to write home about. My investments dropped a bit, but the savings from the extra paycheck this month made up for that.
Looking forward, I’m not expecting great things for November. I have finally decided to pony up the money for a professionally fitted mouth guard to help with my nighttime teeth grinding. I’ve been using an over the counter guard, but it’s just not doing the trick. I only get one set of teeth, so it’s a worthwhile investment.
I also am planning to purchase some Continuing Legal Education courses. I need to take them to keep my law license, and my options are typically to buy CD/DVD classes or travel halfway across the country to take courses in the state in which I’m licensed. Since my office won’t help pay for them, I choose the cheap (though boring) route, and one of the companies that offers the courses is having a 20% off sale for the month of November. This is the first time I’ve seen them offer that kind of sale, so I’m probably going to drop around $500 and get that much closer to my required hours. I am pretty sure that I can deduct the expense on my taxes, but I can’t say that helps all that much.
So November probably won’t be great, but at least it’s planned expenses and things I need, rather than splurging on shoes (which I also need, but that’s another conversation for another 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.
