When I decided to start writing this blog there was always one question everyone asked me. Why? Why do you want to write about finances? So I thought for this Monday Musing I would answer that question.
I have spent my entire life in Orange County, California. In particular, the majority of my years were spent living in a small city known as Villa Park. Villa Park is a small section of the larger city of Orange where the median housing price is roughly $1.2 million.
Growing up I witnessed the positive and negative effects of money. I rarely, if ever, worried about having enough money and my neighborhood was lined with people wanting to be the next Jones-es. Every teenager had a new car at age sixteen, every house on my street had a pool in their backyard. High school was a constant competition to see who had what first and what labels were in or out (the two people in my graduating class voted Best Dressed wore head-to-toe Burberry for their photo). But there was one thing that stood out amongst the cash and flash: people were miserable.
Villa Park has one of the highest number of AA attendees in the county, and at the time I was attending Villa Park High School we were in third place for the highest rate of drug use among students in the state (especially cocaine). Luckily, I was too much of a geek to ever be offered anything and spent those awkward teenage years tucked behind my biology books or oboe. I found that money and sense did not always go together, and for some people, no amount of money was ever enough. During this time my parents also divorced, which raised entirely new issues about money that I had never experienced prior. I finally saw the stress it could raise in people and how money could dictate what someone could and could not do.
In college I learned how little money I could live on and how to enjoy the simple things in life that were absolutely free. At last, I had met people who grew up in the less affluent areas of the country and saw how they used money not as a status symbol, but as a means to get from point A to point B in life (a novel concept for me at the time). I also saw how completely clueless most of us were about things like student loans, grocery shopping, buying textbooks, and sticking to a budget. So I decided I would start learning about finances from anyone who had found something that had worked for them.
After college I saw that many of my friends still had relatively no idea what they needed to do about their finances. Worse yet, I saw that many of them were terrified to look at bank statements and student loan accounts. We all knew that at some point we were going to have to be in control of our finances, but the idea still seemed too beastly to take seriously. It was at that point that I decided that I should start trying to share what knowledge I had with those around me so that we could stop making the easy mistakes and start making the smart decisions that would help us reach our financial goals.
So I finally got enough ideas together and started this blog. Most of what I write about I have experienced first-hand and I am still in a continual state of trying to improve my own finances. I have spent more when I should have saved, bought a textbook without shopping around first, and bought clothes that I never ended up wearing (this last one has taken me an especially long time to fix). My hope is that if I can help everyone who reads this blog save a little money in some way then I can feel like all my personal financial ups and downs will have been worth it. I hope you continue to follow Making the Rent and if you find something you think a friend or family member should read, please share! As Francis Bacon said, knowledge is power.
Water & Parchment 