Sorry for the lack of blog posts this past week. I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday, even if you don’t celebrate. Today, I’m heading home after a long trip to my hometown. It was a great trip, but I’m really glad to be heading back. I’m a little disappointed that I missed all the snow in DC, but at the same time, I was really lucky to have travel plans that didn’t get interrupted.
What did get interrupted were my plans to blog. My parents live in the middle of nowhere (it’s beautiful out there), but they have satellite internet that was on the fritz a bit. Yes, I could have blogged from my phone, but that seemed like a lot of work while I was on vacation.
My Christmas was wonderful. My gifts were all very well received, and I’m already starting to think about next Christmas. I have birthdays and Mother’s/Father’s day between now and then, but it never hurts to stock up on gifts. I gift-hunt year round, and it tends to pay off.
I can’t believe the year is already over. I still can’t figure out where the last quarter of the year went. It’s like it was August and now it’s December. I completely missed my blogiversary, but I’ll include some of those entries in my year-end recap (which at the rate I’m going, will happen sometime in March).
2010 is stacking up to be an interesting year. I’m hoping to finish the year with a new job and possibly a firm decision on housing. I’m seriously considering buying a place this year, so I’m going to start looking around to see what I can find. I’ll likely end up with a condo, given housing prices in DC, but that’s okay. It would be nice to not be paying so much rent every month. But who knows – it might not be for me. It’s a big decision, so I’m not taking it lightly. But either way, it should be interesting.
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.
The snow was craaaazy!