Since the last time I updated my Net Worth, it has increased over 6.5%! I’m very excited by this progress. Very little of it is in cash – most of it is investment growth, but my savings is also growing, and that’s a good thing to see. I’m happy with how things turned out this year. I think I need to figure out an easier way to do my net worth update. It takes longer than I would like to track down all the numbers, which is part of the reason I stopped updating, I think.
Right now, I’m looking at my CDs and which ones to cash out to use for my down payment, should I decide to buy a home. This was the plan when I put the money in the CDs, but it’s a little sad to see them going away after all that time saving. Of course, this is what I’ve been saving for!
(Also, as you can tell, I’m experimenting with different methods of posting, leading to some weird formatting issues. Thanks for playing along with my experiments!)
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.
