Making room

The heat has sapped all my blogging skills.  Or something.  Inadvertent hiatus.  Sorry, readers.

Actually, it’s just been a crazy couple of weeks.  And it’s hot.  It makes me glad that my rent includes electric.  I’m not keeping it ridiculously cool in my apartment, but it’s nice to be able to sit and read a book and not feel all sweaty and gross.

Today, I got an e-mail from my soon-to-be-roommate about when she’s moving in and what she’s bringing.  She’s officially coming on the first of August, but I told her that she was more than welcome to move in the week before and not worry about that week of rent (she’s a friend who has done favors for me before, and that weekend will be much more convenient for her).  I’m excited to have someone else around and excited to have help with the rent again.  I was making ends meet, but not saving as much as I would like.  Now I can go back to saving again.  Very exciting!

I am going to have to do some significant decluttering before she moves in though.  She’s a big cook and is bringing a ton of kitchen stuff.  Unfortunately, our kitchen doesn’t have great storage, so there’s going to be plenty of work to do moving things around and making space for all her things.  My last roommate didn’t have very much at all, so that made things easy.  Of course, some of the stuff can probably be stored away – we both have big stand mixers, for example.  She uses hers a lot, so I can probably just put mine in a corner of my closet and not worry about it.

It’s a good excuse to really go through things and reorganize. My kitchen isn’t set up as well as it could be, mostly because I can’t reach the top shelves, so I don’t store much up there.  I’ve got a step stool, so now I should just start keeping the rarely used things up high and getting rid of the things I don’t use.

I have said it before – I love the idea of small space living, but I just have so much STUFF!

Megan Smith

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.