My Meducation: Why I am Starting This Blog

Quick question: where did you learn to manage your money? If you’re like me, the most formal education you ever got in personal finance was a brief stint in high school economics where you played monopoly (not sure what the lesson was there) and learned how to balance your checkbook (which I haven’t done in about 10 years). Did that prepare me for the real world? Well, I do know how to write a check (but I haven’t done that in a while, either). To their credit, my parents did their due diligence by making me pay for my own things with my own money and encouraging me to save. But they can hardly give me advice about the future when my own reality is and will be so different from their own.

Beyond living within my means (an important aspect that we will talk about soon!), most of my life has been devoid of decisions related to personal finance. In my early 20’s I bought a book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Personal Finance in your 20s and 30s. I readily accepted the early chapters about your first job and budgets and car payments and rent. But once they started talking about mortgages and retirement and taxes, I felt like they were speaking an alien language. My life was too busy to think about such things, and why should I scrimp and save and sacrifice now when I had no hope of saving enough and would probably work until I died, anyway? That was my plan—work until I died. Plus I couldn’t remotely understand what they were talking about.

Fast forward 10 years and hello, reality check! I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure wrangling a 160lb Great Dane into the perfect position for x-rays will be difficult when I’m 70. Of course, I may not do this job forever, but it did get me thinking about the future. What would happen if I became disabled? If I got cancer? If I lost my job? If I had a kid? If I lived long enough to be too old to work (it will probably happen to most of us)? News flash: I would be broke.

So I took my head out of the sand and started my own education in personal finance. And then I started talking about it. all. the. time.  Have you heard of this budget software? Would you take out this loan? What kind of interest rate did you get on your mortgage? Are you making contributions to the 401k or a Roth IRA? How much do you spend on groceries? What kind of deductible do you have on your health insurance? Asking all of these questions was enlightening on two fronts:

• Money is a taboo topic, and sometimes for good reason. Money is not just a tangible resource to be spent or saved. It is deeply entangled in our emotional psyche, whether we love it or hate it or somewhere in between. When you talk about money, it requires you to be incredibly vulnerable.
• But I also learned that most of our generation knows almost NOTHING about personal finance. Yes, we know how to pay bills and use online banking and other essential skills (and don’t forget that we know how to write checks! Hooray!).  But even with modest income a lot of us are living paycheck to paycheck (or on credit) and can’t seem to break that cycle. I know of zero people who saved up a 20% down payment for a house. When I say the words “Roth IRA” people’s eyes glaze over and I hear crickets.

While we pay off our credit card every month, earlier this year I did a quick scan of a credit card statement to see where our money was going. Sometime when I know you better and can be more vulnerable I will tell you what I found. But suffice it to say that I realized we were being terrible stewards of our money. That is when we really started educating ourselves about personal finance. And that is what this blog is for—as Jesse says in Pitch Perfect (it’s okay, you don’t need to be embarrassed that it is your favorite movie ever): “You need a money education. A meducation. And I’m going to give it to you.”

So, some caveats:

1)      I am not a financial planner, an accountant, a tax consultant, or any other professional that qualifies me to give you advice about money.  This is simply information based on my own research and experience. Only YOU can make your own financial decisions.

2)      It’s called personal finance for a reason…because it’s personal. We all have different priorities in life and our monetary choices will reflect those priorities. So no judgment here. With that being said, the goal is that those priorities will actually reflect your values—is the money in your life doing what you want it to be doing?

3)   Economic disparity and income inequality are real things, and I do not wish to dismiss the fact that sometimes it feels like an uphill battle.  It’s impossible to save 10% of your income when you can’t put food on the table, and I don’t wish to diminish that if it reflects your experience. We all should care about economic justice, and I encourage you to work towards it with your actions, your voice, and your vote. I hate that our entire economy is built upon endless consumption of stuff that we mostly don’t need. However, this blog is about taking responsibility for yourself within that framework, even if that framework is completely insane.

So there you have it. It is my desire that a money education (henceforth a meducation) will help you to take control of your money rather than having it control you (believe me, I am in this process with you). And what I have to say is nothing new—there are literally endless resources if you have the time and desire. This blog is merely a dissemination of knowledge that I have gleaned, broken down into manageable clumps to keep you from feeling completely overwhelmed and putting your head back in the sand (what I did for the duration of my 20s).

If you have stories or information to share, I would LOVE to hear them. More than anything, I want people to be able to TALK about money without feeling embarrassed, guilty, boastful, or awkward. We have all made some pretty smart money choices, as well as some absolutely dumb ones. But we have all learned something in the process, and it is my hope that we can share what we have learned with each other.

If you’ve made it this far, I am humbled that you actually kept reading J.  Next time, we will talk about the “personal” of finance before diving in to some practical suggestions. Stay tuned for a meducation!