Debt to Dreams

So far, so good.
We didn’t make whole lot of New Years resolutions but the one that I felt was most important to our financial health for 2007 was having a budget and knowing where we were spending our money.
I mentioned earlier that I have used Quicken for the past year but did not find it [...]

At this point in my life I can easily believe the stories of Residents/Interns in years past having their power/water or telephone cut off because they spent so much time at the hospital that they didn’t have time to pay their bills.
Last week was one of those weeks that I thank those who came before [...]

How many days can you go without spending a dime? Apparently for us, not very many.
My wife and I have decided to make an effort to control our spending this year by writing down all of our expenses for the week on a 3X5 index card. It sounds pretty simple and I can see [...]

I am thinking of changing the name of this blog to Musings of a Married Man because most of my posts this month have been related to married life.
Here is another post to add to that list.
I have spent the past month getting rid of many of the items I have accumulated over my short [...]

I am almost 30 years old, but I still haven’t had my first “real job” yet.
I want to be clear, I do earn an income as a Resident and I definitely work enough hours for it to classify as a job, but because residency is a formal continuation of the education process(an apprenticeship [...]

Ah the joys of married life.   Its the opportunity to build a life together with someone very special.  However before this journey begins you get to purge all duplicate and extraneous belongings.  The process can be very satisfying, sort of like a new semester in school or the start of a new year.   

Wow, we are already halfway through January and I just finished updating our joint financial data.
The process of consolidating our data and finding a good starting point for the year has been challenging. Hopefully once we have a good system it will not take as much effort to maintain an accurate account of our [...]

Don’t worry my wife and I are fine. My microwave however got the boot when the Mrs moved in and honestly I haven’t really missed it…..yet.  I know that it is really strange to live without a microwave nowdays but the decision pretty much boiled down to counter space and the microwave had to go.
Now this [...]

January is an extra special month for me this year because it marks the first month of my life as a married man.
I had quite a few changes in my life in 2006. The most important occurred only weeks ago when my wife and I were married. Because I originally started this blog [...]

Credit Cards are the Ginsu knives of personal finance.
They have evolved from basic debt instruments available to a select few to an essential tool of modern life that can be used for almost anything.
With an increased awareness of the costs of my debt, I found this to be an interesting article suggesting a creative way [...]

They need to pay the bills somehow.
I had been planning on getting out of my current cell phone contract for the past six months in anticipation of reaping some cost savings with a family plan once I was married. Cell phone companies do their best to keep us from switching with large early cancellation [...]

Update, The Pension Plan is Dead,
Not really news to anyone because by this point the death of the Pension plan has been well documented. The funny thing about this is that until recently I never knew what a pension plan was and I never expected to have a job that entitled me to [...]

Happy New Year to All!
This will be our financial plan for the new year. After getting married at the end of December this will be our first year of joint income and expenses. The burden of my debt will be eased somewhat by our combined incomes and we will reap some increased efficiencies [...]