Neophyte in Personal Finance

A lot has happened since my last post. I must say that the largest part of the delay in getting started again hasn't been the changeover from Blogger to the new site. In fact, the culprit has largely been my laziness. It's not only a laziness in getting around to posting on here. It's been a general laziness that I was feeling. This laziness included not keeping track of my finances and, of course, that leads to excess spending. That's something I'll discuss in my next post.

I'm working on setting up a new site. I'll catch up on the news that's been happening to me once I import my old posts from blogger.

Everyone makes mistakes, and I'm not any different. I recently mentioned that I opened a Roth IRA and had started contributing some money to it. It wasn't much, but it was a start with the intention of getting in on the down market. I let my excitement get the best of me and I made a stupid mistake.

(Note: This is my 10th post, and I'm celebrating by starting a series of posts about retirement. I may be only 22, but I've been thinking a lot about how to best plan for a comfortable retirement. I'll kick off the series by giving a brief overview of two types of IRAs.)

Individual Retirement Accounts, or IRAs, were first entered into law by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. There are several different types of IRAs, some of which have been obsoleted or renamed, but I will focus on the two main categories: Traditional and Roth IRAs. Each type of IRA has it's own rules and regulations, as well as restrictions placed upon them. I hope to keep this article light on details of each type, but I do want to cover the most important points.

This past week has been busy, and the work during the next couple doesn't appear to be slowing down. That puts a damper on what I had planned on posting this week, but I'm still going to put up a couple of posts this week. The first one will be another round-up. The second one that's coming later in the week will be about Individual Retirement Accounts. [Edited to Add] I just realized that the end of January is coming up soon, so I'll also be doing a third post on my net worth. (Despite it's pitifully small value).[/Edit]

Although I'm a college student, I've been fortunate enough to not have to take out any student loans. That being said, I'm getting close to arriving at a situation where I will be forced to make a choice: having an emergency fund or staying debt free.