This week I’m interviewing Meg from All About Appearances.  She writes mostly about Fashion, but is a frequent visitor and commentor on my blog.  I think her insights into spending and fashion always fun and interesting.  So check out her site!

1. How did you get your name and what made you start blogging?

After graduating college, I took a break to explore career paths before rushing into a master’s degree.  It was during that time that I started my first blog, All About Appearances, where I still write occasionally.

As the name suggests, I started writing about style, fashion, and other aspects of appearances.  Late in college, I finally started experimenting with style instead of just wearing baggy clothes and flip flops. I learned a lot from style bloggers who taught me things I would never have learned in fashion magazines. So, I decided to share what I had learned.  I named the blog “All About Appearances” partly because I love alliteration and partly because, yes, I knew it would show up at the top of alphabetically ordered blogrolls.

All About Appearances wasn’t meant to be just about fashion, though. I’m interested in how we all judge each other, and especially how deceiving appearances can be.  That led me to start talking about other topics such as money and class, which can be very much about appearances.

I also got into frugality about a year ago and, as with style, I wanted share what I had learned. So, I decided to create FruWiki, the first frugal wiki. I can’t say that the name is very creative, but it’s shorter than Frugality Wiki.

2. What do you do in real life and how’d you get started?

You could say I’m a professional wife.  I’m not very domestic, but I find plenty of ways to help out my husband, especially with his career, which includes a very full-time job and a side business of ours.  I write, edit, organize, research, analyze, advise, assemble things, program, cut costs, etc. One day I might be assembling and programming wireless radios; the next day I’m catching up around the house.

As you can imagine, without an official job title or paycheck, some people don’t understand that I really do work.  And living on one income has financial risks.  However, we’ve figured out that we make more money working together than we would if we were working separately. Plus, I enjoy it and know that my husband appreciates it.

Of course, I also have my websites.  All About Appearances and FruWiki are both labors of love more than business ventures, but I also write at The Bargain Queens which brings in some nice side money.

3. What is the reason you blog about personal finance?

Mostly, to share what I’ve learned.  My husband and I are still in debt from what for us were much leaner times when we weren’t very frugal, either.  But we’ve made significant progress thanks not only to our hard work, but also the information and inspiration that we’ve received from many frugality and personal finance writers.

4. What were your 3 biggest personal finance mistakes?

Not taking an active role in our finances sooner and especially not keeping track of the numbers.  While my husband never hid stuff from me, I didn’t take the time to add everything up.  Everything was abstract.  We knew we needed to spend less, but we didn’t know how much less or even if we were spending less or more.

Getting too caught up in the “It’s only $5!” mentality.  I still love finding bargains, but I’ve learned that cheap things add up and are often low quality. Now I focus on value over price and quality over quantity.  Although I’m willing to spend more on items, I’m
spending less overall.

Obviously, spending too much! Now we shop much less, which saves money and time. And again, because we’re spending less overall, we can afford nicer things.

5. Is your spouse as actively involved in finances as you are and how do you deal with it?

Yes, though he still does more of the banking side while I’m more into looking for ways to save money.

What ties it together is that every week we fill in a spreadsheet with ALL of our account balances. We then know how much we have, how much we owe, and how much progress we’re making.  We talk about how we did over the past week and what we want to do over the next week.  We know where it all goes without having a budget, per se.

We also have a spreadsheet to track of our regular expenses (e.g. pest control, insurance, etc.).  Since we started using that spreadsheet, we’ve been able to make significant cuts.  It’s good motivation since we can see how multiple cuts add up before we make them.

6. How long do you think this current economic situation will last for and how do you propose dealing with it?

We’ll see some progress soon, but it’ll be years before everything is really sorted out.  Much of our economy has been built on wishes and lies.  We can’t expect everything to just go back to how it was – and I really hope it doesn’t! We’re going to have to rethink a lot of things, especially long term.  (For some great ideas, read Simple Prosperity and Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic.)

Short term, I’d love to see the government overhaul education funding. Many schools here are closing.  Teachers without tenure (those who’ve taught as many as three years, even) are being laid off along with other school workers.  The local economy and families are being further devastated, class sizes will go through the roof, and it will
have a long term effect on those students.

The cause is that school funding is based largely on local property taxes, which is bad since 1. it worsens the socioeconomic divide (rich areas have more funding, poor areas that need it more have less) and 2. schools are at the mercy of property values, hence the current crisis. I’d like to see our our federal government send money A.S.A.P. to stop the school closings and layoffs, find an equitable way to fund schools, increase teacher pay, and hire more teachers in order to further lower class sizes — something that’s shown to actually improve education.  It would create a lot of jobs, directly and indirectly.  Plus, we need those kids to be well-educated so that they can fix our screw-ups someday!

7. What was your best personal finance decision?

Educating myself about finances and our situation in particular was by far the best, along with learning to spend less.

Buying our house was also a great decision.  I almost hate to say that because for many it was a very bad decision.  In fact, we almost bought a house that we would have regretted.  But we had a good bit of luck buying our house.  Because it was a fixer-upper and the interest is low, the payments are about what some here pay for an apartment and not much more than we had been paying.  We’ve even made money by renting out the spare bedroom, though we’re done with roommates for a while.  Should we move, I think we’ll be able to rent the house easily and even make a profit.

8. What’s your biggest pet peeve about personal finance?

I hate how many personal finance writers dismiss frugality!  Some make it sound like you can’t make money if you’re saving it!  God forbid you cut your own grass when you could be spending that time making more money!  And why spend time fixing anything when you can just go out and buy it new!

But what they don’t realize is that not everyone can or wants to make a big income, that even those who do have free time that they can use to save money if they want, that frugality can save you time (eating out and shopping takes time, often more than fixing stuff yourself), and that you can multitask. Plus a dollar saved is more than a dollar earned when you consider taxes on earnings.

There are many people working long hours to make high incomes who never seem to earn enough.  If you want to be rich, you’re going to have to think frugally, too.  There’s a lot of confusion about the word, but frugality is just the opposite of wastefulness.  If you want to be frugal, decide what is and isn’t important to you, then spend your resources accordingly, time included.  That’s the secret of real millionaires. (If you haven’t read The Millionaire Next Door, then get a copy from your local library.)

9. Where do you see yourself in 1, 5, and 10 years?

In a year we’ll being doing better, I hope, but in five years we should have our debts paid off except maybe our house.  That shouldn’t be far behind, though.  By ten years we should have a nice nest egg and I hope our business will be large enough that my husband could quit his current job.

10. Tell me something unusual about yourself.

I’m really quite boring, but I’m sort of an academic freak.  I’ve had a 4.0 since middle school, even through college.  I graduated top of university with two majors and two minors.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but I can speak Spanish and translate Latin – though I’m better at diagramming sentences into syntactic trees than actually communicating.  But hey, I know a lot of cool words like epéntesis and caryatides, even if I can’t say, “Turn off the faucet!” in either language.

Thank you again Meg for this awesome interview!