In the last part of 2011, three of my friends got engaged. No, not to each other, to their respective significant others. And another got engaged earlier in the year.
So far, there are three weddings scheduled for 2012 and not one is local.
Yes, it’s going to be an expensive year. Flights, hotels, gifts, etc. Of course, I’m not complaining. I’m excited for my friends and delighted that I can be there. Thankfully, they are all getting married in their hometowns – no destination weddings for this group. I’m just going to have to be very smart about my budgeting this year so that I can afford all of this travel – and so I have enough leave available to use. That’s going to be the tough part, I think.
I’m lucky in that I have a boss who is extremely flexible, especially when it comes to important events such as a friend’s wedding.
So it’s all about budgeting. Both my time and my money.
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.
