Excellent month for my net worth! Up 2.93%. This month, that change is due to a lot of little things. My tax return came in, and I dropped most of that into savings, but even without that, I managed to save a good amount of money this month. Little bits here and there add up. My investments also moved in the right direction, which is great. The interest rates dropped on my savings accounts, but the rates are still better than zero, and that’s what matters.
I realized as I was updating this that I still have not set up my automatic investments for my Roth IRA. This was intentional – I decided to do some research and wait until March before I started up the automatic investments. Of course, have I done that research yet? No. So that’s something to add to the list for when I get back from vacation.
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.
vacation?