Wealth Hike – The Beginning

Welcome to the debut of Wealth Hike – a personal finance blog set out to help educate others on the different aspects of personal finance.  I’m Thias and I will be your (hopefully) decently informed guide to wealth building.  I’m from Northeastern Wisconsin, where I live with my wife (Nikki) and dog (Murphy), and work as an accountant in the manufacturing industry.

My Story

While growing up, personal finance or investing where never common topics in my home.  I was always encouraged to save money but was never told what to do once I saved it. In college, as most students these days, I paid for just about all of it through students loans and the little extra money I made while working at a gas station.  Upon graduating, I left to start my career with 30k in loans and little idea on how I should proceed.  On top of that, I was newly engaged with a fiance working at getting her Masters and her own set of loans.

So, long story short, we were your typical graduates – lots of debt, little in savings, and no idea where to go financially from there.   So I put away money in my 401k, started making loan payments, and saving what I could.  No real plan, just doing what I always thought I was suppose to.

How Did I Get Here

Blogging has always been sitting in the back of my mind.  My wife runs a healthy living blog (www.grabyourkicks.com) and always talked about how freeing it was to write down her thoughts and ideas.  So you can say that I have been surrounded by blogging over the past year.  The idea was there, but I wasn’t sure what I could add to the personal finance world.  Then, a couple months ago, I found a couple podcasts that changed my view on personal finance and helped inspire this blog.  I began listening to the Listen, Money Matters and Stacking Benjamins podcasts.  These two podcasts changed the way I had been viewing debt, investing, and overall wealth growth.  All of a sudden, the idea of investing in individual stocks instead of index funds lost its appeal.  I thought more about paying off debt and building wealth than finding the next hot small-cap stock.  Discovering these two new sources of information helped me focus on what I actually wanted and to work at starting to develop a plan.  What better way to hold one self accountable than by documenting their journey along the way?

Where Do We Go From Here

I hope that you will join me as I begin my journey of learning how to better manage and grow our wealth.  I hope that I might be a resource to readers out there that are also looking to do the same.  Feel free to send in questions/comments and connect with me on social media.  I see this as a great opportunity to learn new ideas and techniques and be able to pass along that information to others.  Now it is time to see what we can do to give our wealth a hike (see what I did there?!).

Follow Wealth Hike on Twitter (@WealthHike)

E-mail Questions or Comments (wealthhike@gmail.com)