Yesterday, my mailbox was full to the point of exploding. Thankfully, it wasn’t bills. Some charity donation requests, but what was filling the mailbox were all the catalogs. Some of them were catalogs I expected – those from stores that I have ordered from in the past. Some were just completely random though. I can’t imagine what I did to get myself on a catalog for fantasy lawn ornaments, for example. I don’t even have a lawn!
I do like catalogs though. Sometimes it’s nice to page through a catalog to see what a store has to offer. Much easier than browsing a website, where maybe you will only search for items you think you might want. In a catalog, you might see the perfect pair of pants in a category you would have never searched in. Of course, I never order from the catalog and either go to the website or the store. But I know a lot of people do still order from catalogs.
I miss the days when we would get the giant Sears Wishbook would show up and my siblings and I would fight to see who would get to look at it first. The toys in there were so amazing. There was always some sort of giant tent or playhouse, something so big that we had no chance of ever finding it under our tree, but it was fun to dream. I love looking at old Wishbooks and seeing what was hot that year. Catalogs just aren’t the same anymore.
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.
