The Queer Money Blogosphere

I received an email today from Nina Smith of Queercents asking me if I would like to participate in an interview portion of her blog. This email led me to look at some of her links and read about some of the other GLBT financial blogs out there. I was delighted with the diversity of stories and information that people have to share about their financial situations. Reading many of those posts was like having conversations with people you know you would almost never have about money: how they paid off their debt, how they got into debt, how they save for retirement, how they budget expenses, etc. It was fascinating! It goes to show you that there is a lot more behind "the gay dollar" than simply not having children, which is the stereotype many people have regarding why a lot of LGBT people seem to have a lot of disposable income. What really is at work is a lot of intelligent, hard-working people who make good decisions with their money.

What I also found is that some of the habits I have been slowly developing over the years are tactics used by others to manage money. For example, I'm no budgeter. I think budgets are like diets in that they just set you up for failure. You go off your budget, then you just say "screw it!" and throw the budget out the window. What has been working for me more recently is what I'll call the "empty checking account" tactic. Basically, I schedule all of my bill payments as soon as I get them, but sometimes the actual pay dates are still weeks away. What this creates in my Quicken log is a relatively low or sometimes even negative running balance. I get paid bi-weekly and I always get the same amount, so I know exactly how much money I'm going to have when certain bills hit the account. This creates a sense of satisfaction knowing that all my bills will be paid, which I find makes up for the fact that I don't feel like I have a lot of money sitting around. It's not really my money anyway as long as I still have debt, so that feeling is merely illusory.

I will be adding some links to other financial blogs I find interesting. Please email me any I may not have found or heard of. I think it is important to support each other's work and I encourage you to do the same.