Friday, February 01, 2008

Financial Fitness

I've always been Jekell and Hyde when it comes to financial matter. Balancing a check book? Nope. Never done it. Investing? Bought my first stocks when I was 18-years-old and opened a Roth IRA about 5 years ago. Polar opposites... I know.

JP has always been very disciplined about keeping everything balanced and knowing were he spent every dime. Enter me. He got out of the habit, computer crashed, townhouse exploded and boom, here we are today. We've been saying for about a year that we need to both get in the habit of being more diciplined. We decided every Friday night we would be boring and do our finances. JP got on board again and I decided I needed to do it. Tonight, we finally did it.

We grabbed a quick dinner and, instead of going to the movies like we wanted to do, sat down in front of the computer and dove into the numbers. I learned how to balance my checking account and set it up so I can see my total net worth. It sounds nerdy, but I'm so proud of us. We did it. Together. We figured this is something we need to:

a) be better disciplined, and
b) learn how to do this (semi) together.

No worries -- no merging of accounts now, but we're setting up the foundation for our future. Wow. Sounds pretty grown-up... :)

Hope everyone is having a fun Friday night (or enjoying balancing their spending/saving for the week).

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