Thank you Nina for the warm welcome! I’m excited to be a part of the sharp team here at Queercents. For my first post, I figured I should discuss what brought me to writing about finance.

Exactly one year ago, there were only two things I knew about compound interest: 1) Albert Einstein was pretty fond of it, and 2) it’s something that people with the money to save for retirement kept blabbering about.

Credit CardsA lot has changed for me in one year, in the fashion of compound interest.

I started 2006 with a new job and a hefty raise so that I could raise start-up capital for my dream of opening a coffee shop. Indeed, I quickly saw my bank account dramatically grow. The only problem was that I wasn’t very good with money. I spent most of my twenties going out, traveling and having a great time on whatever modest salary I was making, just barely being able to pay bills on time, and that was if I didn’t go too wild after a paycheck.

With my thirtieth birthday just two years away, I still had no savings, no retirement nest egg whatsoever, and uncomfortably high credit card balances. I was absolutely terrified I was going to waste my money all over again. Not knowing what else to do or where to start, I decided to take a class on the fundamentals of finance.

The class provided a broad overview of financial management, but with emphasis on utilizing financial tools for business decisions. It had little to do with personal finance, but I was desperate to learn anything I could about money.

As I learned about every detail that goes into income statements, profit and loss statements, and the balance sheet, and the specific ways they’re all connected, my imagination wandered, and I started transposing my own finances into business-like financial statements. I wish someone would have warned me about doing that. I launched into a panic when I applied some financial ratios and saw how much debt I was leveraging to my assets.

Then came time to buy a financial calculator to do some homework assignments for determining future values of money. If we got to use financial calculators in high school, I probably wouldn’t have hated math as much. In fact, I probably would have never opted out of retirement plans or kept high revolving credit card balances if I had learned about compound interest sooner. A simple exercise to determine the value of $100 borrowed at 15% interest over 12 compounding periods finally made me understand what tickled Mr. Einstein about it all.

Within weeks of starting the class, I watched my credit rating soar as I paid down those balances. I poured over the 401k papers at work and developed a pretty diverse and aggressive portfolio for myself, and also began allocating a good portion of my paycheck to make up for lost time. Most importantly, I grasped the whole point about money: Have a plan! It seems like such an obvious point to some, but to those people who never gave a thought about where his or her money went or where it is going, it’s an expensive lesson to learn late in life.

I have a plan now, and I’m going to keep saving for my business. That was my intention before taking my class. But now I’ll get to my goal faster and smarter. It’s going to be a thrill to share my journey and any tips I’ll pick up on the way with the community. So everyone, please stay tuned, and feel free to share your insights with me as well, because I’ll be listening.