As of late (as you have likely noticed), I haven’t really been blogging about money very much. And I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with starting to wonder what really matters.
Now, I’m not saying money doesn’t matter to me. It does. I want the ability to live a comfortable life, to give my hypothetical children a great education, and to be able to enjoy my retirement. But money isn’t everything.
A friend of the family is in the hospital suffering from third degree burns over a large part of his body (due, in part, to his own stupidity). Another friend is in the ICU at Walter Reed. And friends of friends are battling divorces and dealing with ill children and all sorts of things.
So it starts to make my money goals seem like nothing at all.
Of course, with ignoring my money, I find that I’m spending more. And really, what I could be doing is trying to keep the budget tight and use that money to help these friends in small ways or donate to charities helping people like them.
I don’t know, things have just been put into perspective over the past few weeks.
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.
