I’ve been having some technical difficulties with this blog, so I apologize if anything looks funny. I’m hoping to get it all fixed by the weekend. I’m not sure what happened, as I made no updates, but hey, technology just likes to challenge you sometimes.
My roommate and I found out last week that by the end of next year, our apartment building is changing their parking policy. Right now, we can pay for a reserved space or park for free in an un-reserved space. We can have two cars registered to our apartment (and the car has to be registered to a person on the lease). Coming in 2012, we can only have one car for our 2BR/2BA apartment and we have to pay for it. Unfortunately, neither of us is in a position to get rid of our cars.
We, like many other apartment complex residents, are furious. I would be willing to pay to park my car, as would my roommate, but they’re not giving us that option. The excuse is that there are too many non-residents using parking spaces. To me, the solution should then be to tow those people who shouldn’t be parked there. Let the residents park.
So unless they change the policy and let us have two cars (even if we have to pay for them – I’m a reasonable person, after all), one or both of us will be moving. They “kindly” gave us til the end of 2012, but that’s not quite true. Our lease is up at the end of August. We can either re-sign and then break the lease in January (with penalties) or move out by the end of August. I have no idea what’s going to happen. She and I need to sit down and discuss.
And here I thought I finally had my housing situation at least temporarily finalized.
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.
