In case anyone was wondering, it is possible to post on a Word Press blog through the Motorola Droid. The little keyboard is pretty tedious though.
So our office internet is down again. It has been out over a week, and in addition to complicating parts of my job, it has made me feel very cut off from the world. Yes, I do have a Droid (which I will review soon), but it isn’t the same. No fast news alerts. No easy Google access. No blogs on my break.
It has made me feel very cut off from things, and I wonder how we managed before this. Clearly we did, and yes, I am old enough to remember those days. Sometimes I do long for a simpler life, but I am not quite ready to give that uo just yet.
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.
Yes, we are used to it, and I don’t think it’s good for us. The human mind is not built to take in that much information all the time. I recently got an iPhone (did not like the Droid) but I already feel like my life has changed… I can always check my email, surf the Internet, be contacted. It makes me kind of sad.
Oh, we’re definitely inured to the info blitzkrieg that is modern-day life. I think it’s one reason why people love Twitter: The constant stream of information may still be there, but it’s in bite-sized pieces. That’s a lot easier on the brain.
It just makes me laugh to think that, about 15 years ago, my uncle used a pager for work. That way, he said, they couldn’t just call him at home. It allowed him to separate work from home. Of course, they still screen their calls, have a pay-per-use cell phone only for emergencies, and don’t have the Internet. It keeps them happy.
I don’t think I could detach painlessly from the internet. I’m a junkie. But I do often wonder why everyone feels the need to have access wherever he goes. Sure, it’s cool. But it’s hardly necessary. And it may even be too much. It certainly doesn’t help us interact with other people (at least not face to face).