Since I've been away...

One of my passions besides stock trading has always been the outdoors, whether its camping, canoeing, whitewater kayaking, or hiking, I love it all.  Lately I have been getting the chance to hike a lot more lately, which its great for a ton of reasons - keeps me in shape for one, its absolutely the best way to spend a weekend day and you get some incredible satisfaction from completing a good hike (even a bad one!), and it really only costs as much as the gas you pay to get there.

There are 48 mountains in New Hampshire that exceed 4,000 feet, and I have another personal goal to tag them all.  Currently I have checked 18 off my list, with a whole lot more to go!

Here are some of my favorites from this past winter:

Summit of Mt. Lincoln, N.H.

Summit of Mt. Pierce, N.H., looking towards Mt. Eisenhower and Mt. Washington

Me hiking back up after skiing the Great Gulf, Mt. Washington, N.H.

It's very important for me to always keep life in perspective, as much as we can get caught up on the rat race of life, I find a peacefulness and serenity unlike anywhere else in the Whites.  As much as I dedicate myself to my financial goals, when it comes down to it, its just money.  If you haven't had a chance to give hiking a try, it's never too late to start - and only good things can come from it! Happy hiking!

Progress Bar

I was giving some thought as the best way to keep track of my debt, and I was thinking of a few different scenarios.  Whether I monitor it in straight dollars or if I wanted to do it equity curve style, or percentage.  As for ease of use and updatability I landed on tracking my progress by percentage. In thinking of a style I could track it, I figured the best bet was to measure two goals, first my overall long term goal (the big one, being debt free), then my immediate focus as another.

This will hopefully be a helpful way to track my progress during these first months building towards my first debt target.

As for what do I want out of this blog?  Ideally, this could maybe become a bit of a help for anyone else looking to take big steps towards paying off debt.  It took me a long time to really focus on this, the better part of 6 years (I've basically been in debt since owning a credit card.).  If I run into hang-ups, I want to be able to look at how I worked on it, with the blog holding me accountable!

Heeeeeere's Johnny!

After a long delayed personal hiatus (which was financially prefaced by the Audi catching on fire), I would like to start making contributions back to this blog.  From a new perspective. 

 Instead of starting with the original gimmick that I took out a loan from my 401k since I could not come up with the capital through savings (that didn't work out so well because of these unexpected events, and ended up gone), I am going to take drastic action on my outstanding debt, with a short term goal of knocking that out so I can generate some real savings (of course the big goal is funding the trading account.) 

I want to track my progress to really getting back on my feet financially, and this can where I can hold myself accountable.  I still need to come up with some sort of measurement of progress and how that'll be displayed, but I'll come up with something.  For now, I am just excited to start this back up!