This weekend, a bunch of my friends came to town to run the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler. It was a blast! Much of the weekend was spent joking about how in college, we were so lazy, we would order pizza rather than walk to the dining hall, and now we were voluntarily running ten miles. And we weren’t even being chased!
Reviewing my budget over the past year or so, it’s clear that I am spending more and more money on fitness-related expenses – running gear, swimming gear, race entry fees, travel to races, etc. That’s definitely not a bad thing though! I try to be careful about not buying too many unnecessary items, and take good care of my gear so that it doesn’t wear out too fast. It is fun to travel for races, or get a group together to run. For this race, we didn’t even run together, just met up afterwards (we all run at different paces).
I guess this probably qualifies as my hobby. I don’t know that I think of buying socks as a hobbyist’s expense, but in a way, running is my hobby. It’s just convenient that it’s also a good way to keep in shape.
Of course, this hobby could be getting significantly more expensive in the next year or so. The triathlon bug has been put in my ear and it’s buzzing away. Step one, buy a bike.
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.
