Amazing net worth jump this month! Up 4.66%. It was a good combination of cash savings and investment jumps. I think it was a big of a fluke and don’t expect to see these sorts of numbers next month, but I’m going to enjoy them anyway. I’m not sure what’s going on lately, but I’m feeling like I’m losing control of my money right now, and it’s good to see that I’m still doing just fine.
I’m still tracking all of my spending and limiting my cash transactions to between $40 and $60 a month (though that trends higher in the summer when I spend more time at the farmers’ market). I used to enter my transactions into YNAB every couple of days and now I usually don’t track anything until the weekend. I love the new version of YNAB, with the ability to download transactions from my credit card company. I think that’s why I feel like I’ve lost touch with my finances. I’m not as worried about losing receipts or forgetting about spending because I know that I can pick it up easily with the download feature.
For my own comfort, I might have to get back to tracking a little more closely. My spending clearly isn’t getting out of control and I’m so glad that reasonable spending has become the norm for me. But there’s nothing wrong with doing a little more frequent checking in with my finances, just for my own piece of mind. Besides, if I’m doing this well while only being vaguely mindful of my finances, I wonder how much I can save by paying closer attention.
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.
