I haven’t updated my net worth in a while. I’m honestly a little afraid to! The house buying process probably killed my numbers. I’m okay with that, of course. But I don’t know that I want to see it written down.
Over the weekend, maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet and take a look at what’s going on with that pesky number.
During August, I’m going to try to really keep my spending in check. I do have a number of things that I want/need to buy for the house, but I’m going to really be careful to only buy the things that I plan to buy (a fireplace screen, a couch, etc) and not splurge on unnecessary things. Furnishing a home is expensive, even when you’re not spending huge amounts of money on the things you buy.
The rest of the year has the potential to be very expensive for me. I’m running a bunch of races in September and October. That means a bit of traveling and the hazards of race expos. Race expos are a great way to find running equipment deals, but they’re also a great way to empty your wallet. So I just have to keep the spending in check.
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.
I’ve been thinking the same thing. We bought our house in June and are just starting to settle in. Luckily, we found a foreclosure in an outstanding neighborhood, so we bought a house that already had equity! I think if we ran the numbers we’re actually breaking even on the net worth, which is the first in a long time! Who knew a house in this economy could actually be an investment?