Introducing Me (And My Slowly Growing But Still Negative Net Worth)

Hello to anyone reading this; thanks for being here.

I'm a 35-year-old, permanently (at least as far as I know) single woman. I'm not complaining about that -- singleness has its pros as well as cons! But....

As this article notes, single people face some particular issues when it comes to cash flow, housing costs, and retirement savings. (See also this post by Krystal Yee, which got me thinking about this topic a lot.) Those things are definitely on my mind right now. And what with singleness being one of the key factors in my financial life right now, I figured I'd make it the title of this blog, which I'm starting after a couple of weeks of fairly intensive reading around in the personal finance blogosphere. It seems like a really good way to keep myself motivated as I move forward; I like the thought of sharing my journey, which in some ways is well underway and in some ways is just beginning.

Here's the big-picture snapshot of my financial situation, which shows you both "well underway" and also "just beginning":

That's my net worth, starting in June 2013, when I was (thanks, mint.com, for the precision) $21,249 in debt, of which nearly $19,000 was embedded in student loans that were about to begin coming due. I also had $5629 of "assets" (the little green bar) but since $3500 of that is the value of my car, we were really talking...not that much. But counting the car, that brought my net worth in at negative $15,619.

June 2013 was a big month for me; I graduated from a humanities PhD program, located in a Giant Expensive City, and moved to a much smaller, much cheaper city to take a fortunately very well-paid, by humanities PhD standards, but unfortunately only 1-year, job. The move was expensive, since it required buying a fair amount of furniture (long story), but nevertheless, as the summer and fall went on, I started throwing chunks of money at the student debt pretty regularly. So I've arrived at the end of March, 2014, with $7703 in debt and a net worth of negative $1034 (still including the car!) The student loan stands at $7558. In other words, I've paid over $11,000 on the student loan in nine months. By putting basically all my extra income towards it over the next few months, I hope to have it entirely paid off by August.

This is great, and I'm glad I've been able to tackle the loan to this extent, but it still leaves me with a lot of question marks about my financial future, which I'll tackle in my next post.