As my coworkers have been vacationing around me, I have been at work all summer. No days off, just work. Okay, I took half a day for a doctor’s appointment. But other than that, it’s been work as normal.
My thinking was that I was trying to conserve my leave. After all, a lot of my vacations are scheduled around races, and I refuse to race in the summer (it’s way too hot). I vacation in the spring and the fall. But it’s been a while since I’ve had a true break, and I’m starting to feel it. Part of the problem is that my vacations are never relaxing. I like to go go go (and also run a half marathon). My next trip? You bet, a trip for a race, and it’s a short trip to boot. I will be out of town for my brother’s wedding in a few months, and that should be fairly relaxing. Not a lot of responsibilities, just hanging out and looking pretty for pictures.
I should have taken some time off this summer though. Maybe just a long weekend where I could sit around and just do nothing all day. I think we all need time to decompress, and I haven’t been able to do that. And I’m feeling it.
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.
