Memorial Day Weekend. That means summer is officially here. This is awesome because it means less laundry.
What? Well, see, I can wear jeans to work during the summer, and jeans just don’t get dirty like my black dress pants. Therefore, less laundry.
It also means that I have officially missed spring cleaning. So that’s what I’ve been working on the past few days. My house is a disaster! It’s not dirty, so to speak, but it’s definitely not organized. I’ve been really into organizing blogs as of late, and I’ve come up with a lot of great ideas of how to organize. Moving to a bigger house definitely hurt my organization.
For example, while living in the apartment, I didn’t have an office. The only space that was mine was my bedroom. Everything else was shared space. So the clutter couldn’t pile up. And files had to be organized.
Now, I’m in a house and my roommate moved out last winter, so clutter everywhere! And the filing, oh the filing. I have saved all the things that need to be filed away, but they’re just in files. I filled up a file box so what did I do? That’s right, I bought another file box. Which makes sense, except that there’s no logic to what goes in which box. Then I bought a house. More filing! Oh, that’s in a new file box. Except some of it is in the fireproof filebox. Do I know where any of it is at any one time? Sure, it’s in one of those boxes, neatly organized.
Clearly, something must be done. So I’m slowly working at it. I’m going to dig out all of the various file boxes, empty them out, go through each folder, then put things away in some sort of logical fashion. It will work. It must!
(Also, I think one of those file boxes needs to be re-dedicated to choir music, because that collection is getting out of hand.)
It’s not going to happen this weekend, but I will get organized. And it will be glorious.
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.
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