Bloguration

Welcome to Hankincents, where I’m blogging about money and how to keep up with it. In lieu of smashing a bottle of champagne on my laptop, I want to kick things off with an introduction.

My name is Kellen Henry and I’m a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, studying interactive media and business journalism. Some of my classmates and instructors call me “Hank,” as a nickname for Henry and I decided marrying it to a horrible pun would make a pretty snappy and appropriate blog name. More on that later.

In my classes at NU, I’m reading a lot about the economic tar-pit in which the United States is currently mired. It all makes pretty good sense, too– don’t spend more than you make, rent if you can’t afford to buy and pay your credit card bills on time.

But in my personal life, it’s not always so easy to follow the rules. As a full-time graduate student, I’m subsisting on some pretty scary-sized federal student loans. And at the end of a long week, it’s hard to make myself think about how much that cold glass of beer is going to cost me when I’m paying it off with interest in 10 years. Plus, Chicago has some of the highest sales tax in the country, north of 10 percent. There’s nothing like paying now and paying later.

It’s a scary world out there right now (re: tar-pits), but there’s a lot of promise for us too. This recession is a first for most of us twenty-somethings and we’re going to be smarter, savvier spenders coming out of it. I hope this space helps me come up with good ways to do that, while finding a balance between financial responsibility and the other things I value.

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated so feel free to shoot me a note at kellen.henry@gmail.com or look me up my twitter feed, @kellenhenry.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.