INTRODUCTION TO THIS BLOG

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I retired 20 years ago from St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio. During my 34 years of employment I became very interested in the workings of money and finance.  

Shortly, after the start of my employment, I became President of the hospital’s credit union.  I then found out the credit union was in big trouble. They had $72,000 in assets and $70,000 in bad debt. I spent many hours in the evening working with the board members to get us on the right track.  I went to a number of classes to get the right information. During this time I was elected to be president of an officer’s credit union. Both of these were small so I was able to work closely with the members to help them with money issues. When the Hospital closed, all records were transferred to Universal 1 Credit Union.  At that time, our credit union had a net worth of $5,000,000.

I retired from the hospital in 1995, 2 years before the hospital sold to a group of investors. As soon as I retired I started to volunteer for St. Vincent DePaul. They were beginning a new program for homeless men. Many of these men had been addicted to drugs or alcohol or both. Also many had jail or prison records. Remember, I was an unpaid volunteer; but with the demands of the new program and the group of men we were working with, I spent 40-50 hours per week at St. Vincent DePaul. I taught Life skills, but as time went on, we determined that financial difficulties were the big problem. There were 3 courses that I found which addressed this problem. Two were taught locally and one was on line. I took all 3 of the courses. I found that techniques are very different when you teach people with a good financial back ground and a person who has little or no background at all.  A couple of years later the homeless clinic asked me to speak to a group of their clients every Friday.  I did this for 15 years, until lately when I became sick.  More recently I have worked with families at Catholic Social Services. Over all, I have met either on an individual basis or group with over 1200 persons. 

This now ends my personal information which demonstrates how my experiences lead me to do this blog on Finances - for those with little or no background in this area.

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In this Blog, when I use a financial term I will explain the term in as clear a manner as possible. I will attempt to cover a new subject each week. If all goes well, the new material will appear on Tuesday or Wednesday. At this time I would like to introduce an equation that I often refer to. As time goes on I will come back to it and we will discuss in length all of the equation’s parts:

   INCOME = EXPENCES + DEBT + SAVINGS.

 

NEXT WEEK THE SUBJECT WILL BE GOALS