Moving is a lot of work. I’m exhausted and it’s not even done yet. We still have a few odds and ends left in our apartment that I need to pick up later this week. And then I have to clean the apartment. But I’ve got some time to get that done, as we’re not being let out of our lease until mid-April (it’s a long story filled with miscommunications and misinformation). Then there are the approximately eight million unpacked boxes I have to deal with. But we won’t talk about that either.
Home ownership, with all its problems, is awesome! Well, so far, anyway. I love finally having living space! Even though I lived in a sizeable (for the DC area) 2 bedroom apartment for the last 3.5 years, I shared that space with a roommate for most of the time, which seriously reduces the living space. We were always running into each other and my bedroom felt a lot like a dorm room, a place where I had to keep all my stuff, not just the things that belong in a bedroom.
The roommate came with me on this move to my gloriously large three bedroom house, but there’s just so much more space that we’re not stumbling over each other all the time. We also have storage space, so things that were crammed into kitchen cabinets can now be placed on basement shelves. I’m doing my best to cull through things and have created a “garage sale” box. (I figure there may be a neighborhood garage sale at some point.)
Now I just have to make sure that I’m not filling up all of this additional space. It’s nice to be able to spread out, but I don’t want my next move to be ten times worse! Of course, step one is getting rid of all the still-packed boxes in the living room.
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.
