And we continue on with quarter two.
April
I thought about retirement planning. I got a number of comments on a post about the plight of the twenty-somethings. I ran another ten-mile race. (And no, I’m not going to try barefoot running – I pick enough glass out of my running shoes to know that’s a bad plan for me.) I got sick of my local pharmacy and started using an online pharmacy. I went on vacation, which was fun, but probably a bit too much of a splurge in terms of both money and vacation time. I accidentally invested in stocks, but it turned out to be a good thing.
May
Whether or not to pay for your child’s education is a hot topic. I learned some people were being offered a year off for a third of their salary. I tried out a new waxer, had horrible results, then shared my humiliation on the internet. (And I didn’t even learn from this, since I did it again in October, but I didn’t talk about it the second time.)
June
Did you know you can actually buy happiness? And then my roommate’s dad got laid off, which was decidedly not happy. I upped my retirement contributions and felt like a grownup. I was criticized for bringing my lunch to work by some strange coworkers. And the summer continued.
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.
