It’s that time again. Time to look back and reflect. Was it a pretty straightforward and easy road? Or were there more road bumps than expected?
Rough patch
For many of us, this year closing has been very hard and trying. I knew about the unemployment rate reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. To me it was just a fascinating bit of trivia, like a fact you store for games like Jeopardy! but then a friend told me that he lost his job. Then a friend told me she lost hers too. Then another friend.
Close calls
Then it started getting closer and closer to me personally. My dad who works for the state now has to worry about furloughs and the subsequent pay cuts they entail. Then cuts to educational grants threaten the progression of higher learning pursuits. And closest of them all is the drastic drop in revenue from the state of California from the accounts I handle. For many months there, my accounts were not paying us. That was a little scary.
Wrong turns
Of course, the past year has also seen me make my own financial troubles to deal with. This was the first time I really started putting significant money in the stock market and I never realized why they always say that hogs get slaughtered. That was until I started playing with triple leveraged ETFs and then becoming greedy with them, holding them longer than I really should have.
Getting lost all together
With all the places I decided to invest in including my fellow man (check out our lending team), it would have been very easy to lose track of where exactly my money is at and how it is performing. But by using Mint.com, I am very confident in my knowledge of exactly what my money is doing and what I am doing with my money. It has allowed me to really fine tune a budget that I hope I can perfect even more into the next year.
Looking ahead
Now that we are at the end of this particular stretch of road to financial independence, it is very helpful to look back and see where we made good decisions in the past year and where we hit bumps on the highway. This way we can more accurately take advantage of good opportunities or shortcuts and avoid making the same mistakes as we move forward into the coming year and onto the next stretch of road.
(photo: chelseagirlphotos)
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