Well let’s give this a shot.
Welcome My Money Marathon. This is my first-ever blog post, as you can probably tell. My name is Evan Raidt and I am a 24 y/o male who recently graduated as a Mechanical Engineer, working as a Quality Engineer. My hobbies in include spending time with family and friends, basketball, learning about personal finance, video games, and cooking.
My hope with this blog is threefold:
- Help others achieve their financial goals alongside myself
- Document my progress for accountability and future improvement
- Share with others the successes and failures I experience and learn from others sharing their experiences
- Learn about myself by using the blog as a sort of journal
A focus of mine with this blog is to be 100% honest with you the reader, and myself. If I am not honest with myself and treat this as some public-facing BS, then it will never go anywhere and I won’t improve.
I am by no means an expert in finance, nor am I currently rich, as made clear by the name of this blog. But I have seen through reading and listening to rich financial experts that at some point you begin to lose touch with what it was like in the beginning. My hope with this blog is that we can connect on what the beginning and middle of the journey is like.
Who knows if this blog will ever turn into anything. At this point, I am focused on it as a personal tool, with the hopeful side effect of it becoming a tool and resource for others.
Starting Point
As of now, I work on improving my finances by doing monthly analyses of my expenses & income in Microsoft Excel. I have learned VBA programming through work, and I utilize this to analyze my finances more efficiently. As nerdy as it sounds (is), I truly enjoy programming in Excel and Access. I use VBA to allow for auto entry & formatting of stock dividends paid out over time and am currently working on a program to automatically import downloaded expenses and categorize repetitive expenses (i.e. investments, common restaurants, etc.) Automation has definitely become a passion of mine. Stick around for future posts including these spreadsheets!
My current net worth is approximately $55K, with around $50K of that invested in one way or another. I want to be transparent that this includes a $23K custodial account that was passed down from my family to me. I am unbelievably fortunate and privileged to have this account without directly earning it. If you would rather see my ending point as $123K instead of $100K to include the custodial account by all means go ahead. The goals of this blog don’t terminate at $100K, so the more challenges the better.
Nearly all of my savings go towards investments, and I contribute solidly to my 401K w/ match and Roth IRA. I have found joy in investing, knowing that in the long term I will be able to access financial freedom that would be otherwise impossible. Analyzing companies and learning about investing is very enjoyable for me (shout out to Investing for Beginners podcast). In the short term, I started investing in December 2021; AKA the worst time to choose. I absolutely know that in the long term it is a fantastic time since stocks are on sale right now, and pouring money in at this low point will result in massive gains. I hope to detail this outcome on this blog eventually, but for now, I can only sigh.
Moving Forward
My goal in improving my finances is to eventually achieve financial independence. For me, this means not being financially tethered to any outside income sources, being completely self-sufficient off of my own company (hopefully something like this here blog), and my investments. I want a life where I am freer to enjoy time with family and friends, invest time in hobbies, and run my own schedule. This is no small feat, but the more effort I put in, the more that dream comes into focus. The 100K goal that this blog is based on is a milestone on this journey that I want to achieve as soon as possible. This is by no means the threshold to financial independence for me, but it indicates a drastic improvement in my financial situation.
Hopefully, you can’t tell that I have no clue what this will turn into, but maybe you can. At this point I will have at least one post each week, detailing how I am working to improve my finances and progress toward my goals. As I said before, I don’t want this to be a one-way street. If you have any advice or questions, please contact me. Talk again soon.
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