one year ago

A popular meme in blogs is to go back one, five, and ten years and reflect on what you were doing at the time. So I decided to go back one year at Verity and see what we wrote about in the January 2005 issue of Your Money.

Bill’s President’s Message was on the personal savings rate in America, which had dropped to .2% of disposable income. This made me curious…what is the personal savings rate in America today? So, with a little help from Google, I came across a few articles that said it had fallen to zero in June and is now negative. Yikes. The latest article I found was this one, in which the author gives tips on saving and says the best emergency plan is a “regular, old-fashioned savings account.”

Personally, if I go back one year in my life things look pretty much the same. However, if I go back five years, I remember one of my most memorable Christmases ever. I was living in Boston and wasn't able to make it home to Texas, so I spent Christmas all alone for the first time. I made myself a nice breakfast in the morning, opened presents, went for a nice long walk, had a visit from a friend and then made myself dinner. By the end of the day my roommate Rich had come back from his parent’s home in Brookline and we spent the night watching movies. The best part of the day was walking through the snowy streets of Boston. It was so quiet, I felt like I had the entire city to myself. Definitely the most peaceful Christmas I’ve had.