I don't own much... an old, beat up 1997 Chevy Cavalier I bought when I was 19 years old and my computer equipment. What I do have is over $42,000 in school loan debt. (That's down from a starting point of $53,000 though, so I guess I can say I've made some progress).
I blog about
debt all the time, and share tips about how I got out from underneath excessive debt on
credit cards used while in college.
But I'm all grown up now. I have 2 young children, and I'm ready to start building a "networth". My husband has a house in his name, but I'm not including that as part of my networth, because it's not in my name. Financially, I'm independent anyway, so I thought it made more sense to track our financial stuff separately.
I just opened a savings account with SmartyPig - and the goal is to save $2000 towards a Disneyland trip because in addition to wanting to pay down my debt and build networth, I want to take my children to Disneyland. I will contribute $29 a month to it for now, and as my credit card debt is paid down again, I'll increase that a bit.
I have a separate savings account with ING that is specifically used to save for school and property taxes for my husband's home. We contribute $60 a week to that in order to have enough when the taxes are due. I'm including this as part of my expenses because I generally am the one contributing to this particular cause. (He tends to wait until the week it's due to say "Oh yeah, we don't have the money for tha taxes yet-" so I had to take matters into my own hands and set up a savings account for it so that wouldn't happen again!)
So that's how I'm set up. I also have a regular checking account that I use whenever I need to write checks, an ING checking account that I don't use very often but should because it earns interest; and a paypal account.
No retirement or investments at this time... that's on my list of things to start.
