Jennifer Lynn over at Broke-Ass Student tagged me for the blog meme asking the question “why do I blog?”

Blogging has been a long, strange journey for me. Poorer Than You is not yet two months old – a baby compared to other blog, and especially compared to my writing history. I started writing at the tender age of six, when I started my own newspaper for kids, called the Kid’s Gazette (and I still go by the moniker kgazette to this day), which I was the Editor-and-Chief of for seven years, up until the tender age of 13. Yes, I had employees – staff writers who contributed articles for 10% of the issue’s profits. Yes, I had profits. It was my first business and my first foray into “writing for the masses.”

The next year, in the February of 2001, at the age of 14, I started my first blog. That means I’ve been blogging for six years, which makes me feel old, despite my youth. My first blog was actually fictional – I experimented with whether or not I could fool people with a fictional diary, which is something in the vein of LonelyGirl, although I certainly didn’t do it as well. After a few months, I tired of it, and began anew, with a diary that was actually mine. I bounced around for the next couple of years – writing in a blog for about a year, then moving to a different service and password protecting the old one.

In 2003 I started “Green Moths,” my ultimate diary blog. Started the summer before my junior year of high school, it extends into the present day. These days, I don’t write in it more often than every few months, and it’s been pushed into the “password protected” realm while I work on this one.

In this time, I also started a blog at LiveJournal, but I tend not to count that one, as I basically used it to post quiz results and random rants. I kinda hate LiveJournal, to be honest. I only got the account so that I could comment on my friend’s journals.

This little history lesson hasn’t really answered the question of “why” I blog. There must be a reason for me to continue an activity such as this for so long. A lot of it is simply the writer in me. When I was young, I wanted to be a writer when I “grew up.” As I discovered this wasn’t actually a profession in and of itself: you can be a journalist, or a novelist, or a screenwriter, but you can’t really be just a writer – or, at least, that’s what I was told.

As my profession of choice changed (ballerina, to teacher, to writer, to ?, to CSI, to filmmaker, to ?), I continued to always write, and always on my own terms. I always wanted to keep a diary, but I was always insanely slow at writing my hand, and lighting fast at the keyboard. When I discovered so-called “weblogs,” the idea just fit.

Nowadays, blogging isn’t about keeping a diary for me. Sure, all this nostalgia has me hankering for logging back into my diary and writing a post, and maybe I will, but when I discovered personal finance blogs, it was a case of “new interest meets old,” and the pieces fell into place.

In the end, I blog because my fingers will type whenever they get near a keyboard – a blog is just an excellent place to channel that activity, and get my brain involved in the action.

Finance Guy at Money and Sense, Gradgal at Grad Getting Out of Debt, and Living Almost Large, I tag YOU to answer the question… why do you blog?

ISPF over at Grad Money Matters interviewed me, as well as

Golbguru from Money, Matter and More Musings,
and English Major from An English Major’s Money

as part of Ethics, Values & Personal Finance Week.

Yeah, that’s a lot of links all at once, so, here’s the interview. Start there.

The past few weeks, I’ve been sitting tight, waiting money from different sources that’s owed to me. Not quite a good as getting a job, perhaps, but at least something is coming in. All the money that’s due to come in already has a use tagged onto it. So I got thinking, what would I do with the money if someone handed me $X right now? Well, when X = …

$0.99: To my change jar it would go!

$10.00: Into my wallet, where it would eventually be spent on food (at least that’s what my Excel document titled “Expenses” tells me I usually use cash for)

$100.00: Into my checking account, where it would sit until my next car or credit card payment.

$1,000.00: Hmm… as the numbers go up, I have to think longer. I’d pay the $400.00 I still owe the school (argh), then put $200.00 towards my credit card debt, then put the rest in my checking account for future car/credit card payments.

$10,000.00: First I’d make this sound: “SQUEE!” Then I’d pay the school the $400.00, pay off my credit card debt completely, pay the interest from my unsubsidized student loan, take my car to the mechanic, buy a bunch of shirts from mondonation and give them away, and then put what’s left (~$7,000.00 depending on how much my car costs to fix) in my high yield savings account for school expenses.

$100,000.00: Buy a trampoline. I’m serious, I’ve always wanted one. Then, I would pay the school, pay off my credit card, pay OFF my student loans, take my car to the mechanic (yes, even with $100,000, I wouldn’t replace my 1996 Oldsmobile – I mean, it’s only got 47,000 miles on it!), loan my mom about $10,000 to fix certain things with the house that will make it sell for more, max out a Roth IRA for the year, give $10,000 to a charity (haven’t decided which one, yet) and put the rest in my high yield savings account for school expenses.

$1,000,000.00: Faint.

Ugh. I’m a small town girl by nature, so large cities bother me on principle. But LA is by far the one that grates on my nerves the most. Everything here is really fake, and the prices astound me. Gas is up 35 cents over the national average. Hair color that I usually buy for $5.00 is $8.50 here. Even McDonald’s suffers, as some items that are on the dollar menu at home are $1.25 here.

Don’t get me started on the housing costs.

In a city where your dollar doesn’t go as far, it’s even more important to look into ways to be frugal. However, in LA, it’s even harder to do so. The compulsion to compare yourself to everyone else is even harder to escape. I considered not bringing my purse because it’s from Target, and not at all trendy, and I wondered if I would feel awkward carrying it around. I’ve already been to two apartments with large (in one case, VERY large) HD TV sets. This place gets into your head.

But I’ve just got to maintain my cool. People with H3s aren’t to be admired – they’re to be shunned! (I hate consumer-grade Hummers.) And that Lexus is probably leased. In fact, although there are plenty of people out here with the funds to buy these big ticket items outright, there are many more people out here who are digging themselves into a hole trying to keep up with those Super-Jonses. And while I may be lured to do the same, I have put other priorities first.

In the end, you can’t tell the difference between a leased car and a purchased car, and you can’t tell the difference between a TV paid for with credit cards and one paid for with cash. So, to ease my own mind, I’ve decided to assume that they’re all financed, just because it makes me feel better about not having them.

So I’ve made it back to sunny Southern California, and I have not yet gotten used to the time difference or the giant glowing thing that hovers in the sky. Oh, and the exorbitant prices of everything! One trip to the supermarket is all it takes to remind me that there’s about a 70% markup out here, compared to Rochester. I’ve already refused to buy anything but food – and even on that front, I packed some non-perishables from my cupboard into my suitcase, to cut down on the amount The Fella and I have to buy.

Not to mention the fact that we got a parking ticket within the first 24 hours of me being here.

Still, I feel pretty good about our efforts to save money, despite being in this city of excess. Yesterday we ate lunch at Subway for a total of $8.00, and went grocery shopping… with a list! And didn’t buy anything that wasn’t on it!

Since the two of us are both trying to clean up our finances, I developed a little game that I hope we both stick to. You see, both of us have credit card debt equaling 80% of our credit limit. So the game is this: a race to see who can pay off all their credit card debt and THEN open an ING Orange Savings  account with $250 (to get the $25 bonus). I think it’s a pretty fair race, since we both have the same percentage of debt (compared to our line of credit), and even though he makes more than I do (and it will still be more even after I get a job), he has more expenses than I do.

Hopefully, a little friendly competition will kick us both into gear.