My roommate is officially moving out as of the end of the month.
For all intents and purposes, she’s already gone now. She’s just got a few things left in the house. She had planned to move out at the end of the year, but due to a family crisis, needed to leave a month early.
It’s nice having my space back, but I’m going to miss the extra income, and I’m going to miss having someone else around, even with all of the frustrations of sharing my space.
But even with all the talk of money lately, with the proposals floating around Congress that will hurt my financial situation as a federal employee, with all the talk of the 99% and people occupying various cities, I have trouble bringing myself to care.
In the next few weeks, my roommate is going to lose someone very important to her, someone who will die decades before their time.
And that puts everything into perspective and reminds me just how lucky I am.
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.
