Introducing Alan Schram

I’d like to welcome Alan Schram, who is joining me as a writer here at Canadian Finance Blog. While many of you may have read his posts in the past, for those who haven’t, I’ll let Alan introduce himself to you.
-Tom

Just over a year ago I realized that most of the stress that was in my life was related to money. I was thinking about proposing to my girlfriend, I was living paycheck to paycheck, and I had no idea where I was going to get the money to buy her an engagement ring, let alone pay for a wedding and support a marriage. Every day I was waking up and going to sleep thinking about money. Should I be making more money? Should I be saving more money? Where is all this money going, anyways?

As I do with most things I seek the answer for, I googled it. I started reading a couple of personal finance blogs that I am sure most of you are aware of, like The Simple Dollar, and Get Rich Slowly. I began to track my finances, by going over my credit card and bank account statements, writing down in categories everything that I bought. I found out that I was spending almost $300 a month just on groceries, and could easily cut back there. After a few months, I started blogging about everything that I was learning, and eventually, started my own personal finance website.

Financially, my life got a lot more complicated, as my fiancee and I started to talk about our money, and how we were going to combine our finances. However, at the same time, I implemented a lot of simple measures to make my finances easier. I set up an online bank account, with an automatic withdrawal on payday. I found out that I didn’t even miss the money that never made it to my bank account. We discussed our spending plans and goals for the next year or so, and that made it easy to not waste money on trivial items, but instead focus it towards paying for our wedding and our future together. As I learned, I wrote, and slowly, my personal finance website grew and grew.

But then I got married. The wedding was fantastic, and we didn’t go into a single dollar of debt. The honeymoon was fantastic, but when we returned, we were so busy setting up our house and our lives that I didn’t have time to blog anymore, and I found out that the stress that I had from finances simply wasn’t there anymore. We had set up a system, and it worked for us, so I wasn’t worried about money anymore. I lost motivation to blog or to continue to grow my website, so a few weeks ago, I sold it.

Almost immediately after, Tom was gracious enough to contact me and ask if I wanted to write for him. He had enjoyed my writing and was hoping to include me as part of Canadian Finance Blog. I was flattered, and while I didn’t miss a lot of the grueling work that is running a website, I missed writing, and happily agreed.

So where do I go from here? Well, financially, I am not exactly ready for retirement, if you know what I mean. My wife and I both take transit everywhere we go, and one of our goals for 2010 is to buy a car. So over the next few months I am going to be researching cars, car buying strategies, and approximately car maintenance costs. Another one of our goals is to pay off one of our debts (probably the smallest one). We are more than meeting the minimum payment on our current debts, but I am going to see if we can find a few more dollars here and there to throw at our debt. Finally, I may be looking at how difficult it would be to file my own taxes this year, and just what I have to do in order to make that possible. I hope that you will come with me as I continue to explore my personal finances, and hope that you can learn something as I am sure to.

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