I have to admit, things went a bit off the rails in 2010, financially speaking. I stopped updating my Net Worth. I stopped carefully tracking my budget. I’m still using YNAB, but I have budget overages every month. Some months are worse than others.
Sometimes it’s unexpected, like dental work that cost a bit more than planned, but many times it’s just me not paying attention to my spending. I definitely need to tighten things up and start checking in with my budget at least once a week, probably even more than that, just to really get a good look at what I’m doing.
I’m also back to thinking about buying a place next year. It’s more likely than it was this year. I’m going to have to move. Our apartment complex is under new management, and I don’t like a lot of the things that are going on, but the biggest problem is that they’re going to begin charging for parking and also allowing each apartment only one car. My roommate and I both have cars and neither of us can get rid of them. And with the increase in rent, the “drop” in my pay, and the added cost to park, it’s not feasible for me to live in the apartment alone.
So I’m going to start hunting for something to buy. I’ve got a good recommendation for a Realtor, so I’m going to contact her sometime after the holidays and get started looking. Our lease is up in September, so there’s plenty of time, but if the lease must be broken, so be it. Thankfully, that penalty isn’t too bad. Then there’s the question of what my roommate will do (I’m not going to leave her high and dry, that’s for sure), but that’s a conversation for another post.
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.
