Ouch!
In May, my net worth dropped 3.87%. The market had a rough month, and my drop is entirely in investments. My cash accounts are doing fine and I continue to save (and invest in my retirement accounts). I knew it was going to be a bad month when I went to update my Roth IRA numbers and it was worth less than it was last month, and that’s with a monthly contribution! Not a good sign at all.
But that’s part of investing. Give and take. And I’m still up for the year, and that’s important. Thankfully, I don’t have any stock in BP, so I figure that the numbers will eventually come back. Nothing to worry about. Just keep doing what I’m doing, saving and investing, and getting ready for the future.
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.
