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More Clever Than Ever…….Meet Brock!

Hi, Clever Dude readers!

My name is Brock, and I am excited to introduce myself as a new writer here at Clever Dude!  Don’t worry, the original Clever Dude will still be posting as well, I’m just coming on board to fill in some of the gaps and  increase the amount of cleverness you get here.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself.

I’m a happily married man, with a son that has just recently become a teenager. I work in the IT field, and have worked my entire career with the same company. My family is very important to me, and I spend as much time with them as I possibly can. I exercise daily, but I also enjoy cooking, especially firing up the grill.

Like many families, we’ve accumulated some credit card debt, but we have a good income and have been consistently saving for retirement from the day we started our careers.

We thought we were doing OK with our finances.

When my son had his thirteenth birthday, my wife and I had a revelation about our finances. Our son would be heading off to college in just a few years, but we had never gotten around to starting that college fund for him as we had intended to do shortly after he was born. We also questioned why we always had money for day to day activities, but we never seemed to be able to accumulate anything in savings. We took a good look at our finances, but discovered that with our current lifestyle and spending habits we didn’t have the available funds in our budget to be able to do either of these things.

We weren’t being very wise with our money, and needed to make changes.

Over the last couple of months we’ve closely examined what we were spending our money on, and have started to reduce our lifestyle footprint  so we can spend less on day to day living, and instead use our money to fund more important things.

I want to share with you our experiences as we figure out how to get the most our of our money. I also want to share with you my experiences as a husband as well as a father of a teenage boy as he grows into adulthood and all the challenges that brings to the table. To put it simply, I want to share with you the experiences of a family trying to be the best that it can be.

I hope you’ll follow along!

Brock Kernin

Brock is a software engineer by day and personal finance blogger at night. He is a fitness junkie and enjoys grilling and smoking meat. Married with two children,  Brock strives to improve his skills as a husband and father, and is always on the lookout to stretch his family’s budget as far as he can.