Since I know money will be one of the main focus in this blog, I thought I would start off by giving you a quick background.
I grew up in California to immigrant parents. Although we grew up in low economic class for the most of my childhood, I did not know it until recently. And there was really no reason for me to know -- I grew up in an upper-middle to upper class neighborhood and whenever I needed anything for school, my parents bought it for us. Sure, we ate in almost every night but that was largely because my father prefers our native cuisine. They drove their cars into the ground (and still do to this day) but that is because they are not flashy people. My mom's hobby is to go shopping at the nearby mall. But I realize now that my parents were extremely frugal and made smart money decisions to spend their hard-earned money on purchasing great real estate (both commercial and residential), living below their means, and investing heavily in my and my sister's education.
Unfortunately, these are all things I am having to piece together now in my adulthood. Although they were great with money, they rarely talked about it with me or my sister. My parents saw what happened to their friends and former colleagues during the Asian economic downfall in the early 90s and never seemed to have recovered, therefore still do not invest in the stock market. Retirement system is completely different here than in their native country so I didn't know about RothIRA or 401k until my first full-time job. But I was able to see first-hand that fulfilling homes could be created on relatively low income if managed right.
When I was blogging as Fiscal Responsibility, I was a recent college grad, living in a mid-size city and trying to determine my future career path. I had attended a private colleg but, thanks to generous scholarship and partial assistance from my parents, I was able to graduate free of student loans. I was just getting into investing and contributing to RothIRA when I decided to attend business school.
As funny as it sounds, it is in business school when I suffered from life inflation the most and also made some bad financial decisions. I was able to obtain substantial scholarships for my MBA, yet I still took the maximum Stafford and Perkins loans during my two years just because I could. That extra money helped me travel around the world to multiple continents, which I do not regret. Instead of living a student lifestyle, I went out and lived the life of everyone else, which included eating out multiple times a week. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship with a boyfriend who spent money to brag and he dragged me down with him.
And it wasn't until I graduated, moved to Chicago, then met Scott that I finally decided to get serious about money again. When Scott and I started to talk about marriage, I tried to steer him in the right financial direction (story for another time) and started to invest in things like RothIRA and 401k again. Although I tried to be frugal for awhile, I started to suffer from frugal burnout and a perfect storm of being tired of fighting about money with Scott, feeling underappreciated by my then company, and deciding that I deserve a higher income led me to switch up my life. So, three months ago, I switched careers. Because it is at a start up, there are plenty of risks of the company being not stable and it is leading me to stay on top of my finances.
So now we are here. After I provide you with Scott's money background, I will do a post on our current financial standing that I hope to update monthly.
