One of the things that I did prior to moving is set up a moving budget. This was the total amount of money that I wanted to spend for the move and all the costs associated with it. That included some of the immediate maintenance/improvement things I wanted to do, like put down gravel in the driveway and have the gutters cleaned, as well as the things I needed to purchase, such as lawn care tools.
And that budget is officially gone. Have I done everything I hoped to do? No, but I’m not worried. The move itself is complete. I’m sure I will be making many more trips to Home Depot in the next couple of weeks to pick up odds and ends, but I’ll just have to make that work out of my normal monthly budget. But this new budget is just a bit tighter than my old apartment budget. My costs have gone up, plus I’m trying to sock away extra funds for repairs and things I realize that I need for the house. So that means that my planned trip to Costco over the weekend will just have to wait. Nothing wrong with that, of course. I just have to be a little more careful with my money and where it goes.
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.
