Right about now, I am asking myself this over and over again. Oops! Maybe I should have thought about that before I started typing away!
I suppose the right way to start off would be to tell you a bit about myself ;-) I am a twenty-something female living in the Midwest (how boring is that!), who just graduated college with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting in December, and landed my dream job doing accounting for a large corporation. Don’t judge me, ok? I like numbers, thrive on finance, and am a perfectionist, so accounting is perfect for me! I am married, have two very active dogs, and one very unplanned baby on the way! The Big Guy (as I will refer to my husband from now on), is in the National Guard, working on his Bachelor’s Degree, works a full-time job, and still finds time to keep me happy! Did I mention he is my best friend?
I guess that baby was what spurred this whole thing… I have always been a personal finance geek, but kept pushing goals onto the back burner. Finding out I was pregnant made me FREAK! Like, literally, “Oh my god I was never planning on having kids ever especially not 9 months after I graduate college!” craziness! The inevitability of this baby made me think long and hard about how prepared we were for the future. The Big Guy and I got married when we were 19…I was still in college, and he worked full-time to support me while I finished my degree. When I graduated, I was lucky enough to land a job in accounting with a large corporation, and then found out mere MONTH LATER that I was pregnant. Not good. Well, its good, but not too…. Anyway, I like to think that we were in better shape than our other recently graduated twenty-something married peers, but definitely not in good enough financial shape to be ready for a baby.
So, we bought a house – something we were going to do anyway – but we moved up the timetable for buying a house and closed in April on a big, 4 bedroom ranch with a full basement that, when finished, would double the floor space! It had been unoccupied for several years (more on this to come !!!) so we put about $7,000 into it before we even moved in, and I think it looks great! There will be a blog post coming soon for the whole house journey, and how we scored a house for 1/3 of its market value!
After moving into the new house, I took stock of our situation, and while it wasn’t terrible, I wasn’t great either… It is the typical situation of too much debt and not enough savings, but through it all I could see that it WAS possible for us to build up enough wealth to be financially independent by age 40. Whats more, we could do it WITHOUT killing ourselves. All it would take was a little discipline and thought!
So I guess what I am trying to say is that is that this blog is motivation for me to put all of our finances out there, the good, the bad, and the ugly alike, because knowing that someone – anyone is seeing them motivates me to make our situation better and better…
What is the plan, then????? The first post will detail our current financial situation – and I mean DETAIL, baby! I am an accountant, therefore I love detail. This will establish the starting point of my journey to be Retired by 40!
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