This has not been the world’s best week. Yesterday, I woke up to find water running down the wall in my kitchen. Not exactly what you want to see at 6 in the morning. Or ever, really.
So it turns out that the people upstairs had a leak in their kitchen. And my kitchen looks horrible now. The wall is peeling and the countertop is pulling apart at the seam (I’m sure it was not exactly high quality material). Thankfully, I live in an apartment, so there will be no expense to me, but I still have to deal with the frustration of getting it repaired.
I’m having them come in tomorrow to look at it and see what they can do. I could just let it go, but the last thing I want is to end up having to pay for it when I move out – I’d rather they know about it now. Of course, they should know, as I called maintenance and had them come in and look at it before they started their hunt for the leak. But better safe than sorry.
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.
