This Is Not A Personal Finance Advice Column, Part 2

I once again bare my soul to you in an attempt to get my shit together, financially.

Maya Kosoff
6 min readMar 30, 2021

The last time I wrote about personal finance, it was mostly a cautionary tale. I told you exactly how bad with money I’ve been, and in an attempt to rectify that, I went on my own personal cancel culture crusade. That’s right: I cancelled a bunch of automatically renewing subscriptions I had no business continuing to pay for. Gone were my Wall Street Journal and Hulu subscriptions. I went in person to the Union Square Planet Fitness to cancel a lingering gym membership from 2015. I have taken the Q train during my lunch break in a pandemic in pursuit of bettering my personal finances.

Now I have taken the next step to attempt to get smarter about money. With the help of Jared at PNC Bank, I have started an IRA. You may be wondering how I ended up here, with an IRA, and I am happy to explain it to you. I am not quite sure I could explain to you what an IRA is or what it does, but I’m going to try.

Accurate picture of my life’s savings. Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

This whole thing started with me looking for a new accountant to help me with my taxes this year. Most years I just use TurboTax to file my taxes myself, but most years I just have one thing to file, a W2, and it’s easy to do my taxes. But I’ve grown to be pretty horrified…

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Maya Kosoff

i’m a freelance writer and editor. you can also read me in places like the new york times and vanity fair.