My name is Justin and I’m the creator of Money Is The Root.   You may have noticed that my tagline is “money is the root of all things good”, a play on the old adage that it’s the root of all evil.  As I’ve said many times I don’t believe that money is necessarily the path to happiness, it’s just a means to a happy ending, and the root of everything in between.

I was raised by divorced parents that were polar opposites when it came to personal finance.  Neither of my parents never had much money.  However, my mom was very keen on saving and living well within our means, and I never went without.  In fact, she paid for a large portion of my undergrad degree, and taught me many valuable lessons about spending and saving.  We still had our worries about financial and job stability, but over the years we made it work.

My father was on the other end of the spectrum when it came to finance.  He was a loving father who also paid a good portion of my undergrad degree, and spent as much time with me as he could.  Regardless, he would tend to live beyond his means, flirting with bankruptcy more than once and eventually succumbing to it.

I tell you the story about my parents to show you the roots of my interest in finance.  I love both of my parents very much, but obviously each one showed me a very different perspective of financial responsibility.  Both ingrained in me the importance of a college education, owning my own home, and now in later years they have showed me how important it is to save for retirement.  I always have and always will worry about their prospect for retiring at a healthy age, and if I can help in any way then I will.  I know that retiring at a healthy and relatively young age is personally important to me.

DIDN’T LISTEN

Despite what I’ve learned about financial responsibility I spent many years in my 20’s doing just the exact opposite.  It took credit card debt, student loans, little savings, all in despite of a well paying salary to teach me the error of my ways.  This led me to spend a lot of spare time perusing one personal finance blog after another.   I found a ton of useful information that genuinely helped me reverse my poor financial position, and gave me many of the qualities that I carry with me now.  Though after a few years of reading the blogs I found myself having conflicting opinions, and I wanted an opportunity to share what I learned and my own thoughts on personal finance.  Thus I launched Money Is The Root back in February.  I am anything but a technical person, so learning how to begin my own site took quite a bit of time, but I couldn’t be happier that I began and have since stuck with my blog.  It has since become a rather enjoyable hobby, and surprisingly another source of income.

STARTING OFF AND CONTINUING

When you begin blogging it can be quite frustrating in the beginning.  You can write a couple dozen articles and never get noticed, receive no comments, and have very few visitors.  It takes research, dedication, the ability to produce consistent and quality blog content, and a ton of hard work.  Finding a selfless and helpful group like the Yakezie may be the only reason that I have had the successes that I have.  Our network is a successful niche of over achieving bloggers that are more than welcoming.  I will admit that prior to joining the Yakezie I didn’t honestly see myself sticking with my blog, and now I can’t imagine not continuing on indefinitely.  As a member I am going to work hard towards lending a hand to new bloggers while giving back to those who so generously helped me.