What is your number?

What does it mean to be "rich"? What magic "number" will make you feel secure? There are a lot of financial calculators out there that will calculate when you'll be a millionaire or there are graphs that show how you rank among your peers.

On CNNMoney, there is a "Millionaire Calculator", where once you tell them how much you have, how long you will save and what rate you expect your returns to be, to find out when your nest egg will reach 7 figures. There is a Net Worth: How Do You Stack Up calculator where if you enter in your age and income, it will show the median net worth for your age as well as for your income. I don't know if this is supposed to motivate me or get me depressed. Since there is quite a disparity between the numbers, should I just average the two numbers that I get?

I know that building up a nest egg takes time and work, but for a rather impatient person, it's an agonizingly slow process. I have a number in my head, one that is part based on rationality, such as what calculator say I'll need by the time I retire, and the other part on an emotional or psychological need, just a number that I feel is enough to enable me to continue living in relative comfort without worrying about starving.

While I have this magic number in my head, I have to balance that need to accumulate so that I can also accomplish my other goals. So what are my goals?

1. Save enough so that I can ultimately reach my magic number. Reaching this magic number will require a plan for retirement savings, general savings and investing.

2. Save enough so that I can provide for my children and provide for their education. We're still deciding whether we want to foot the entire college bill or pay for a portion of it, but I want my children to have options once they apply for college. Since the costs are continually going up, I have to set up a plan to save for their college education costs.

3. Live a little. While I should save for the future so that I can accomplish my goals, I also have to balance it with the need to live for today. Family is important and I want to create good memories by going on outings and going on reasonable vacations.

I believe that I can accomplish these goals, as long as I keep a balanced outlook and not get too stressed about missing a benchmark here or there.

Who Am I?

Who am I? I'm just a person living in the Bay Area in California trying to make navigate through these tough times and also keep my sanity in the process.

I've always been interested in personal finance, but there are so many temptations and during these tough economic times, it's hard to keep focused. There have been some stumbles, but I've always tried to keep a long term perspective while also balancing the need to live for today as well. Now, I am wondering if I should have kept my money in mutual funds and watch the value of my funds go down at least 30%, and whether I should keep trusting all of the so-called "experts" when they state that this is a true buying opportunity and that the market will eventually rebound. I guess all I can do is hedge my bets, continue to invest, try to save and try to keep my worries about the present at bay.

I guess my focus for this blog is to put my perspective out there. I think that you have to sacrifice quite a bit to live in the Bay Area, but the same basic principles apply regardless of where you live, that one should learn from past mistakes, save and plan for the future, but also live for today. I know that there is a chorus of personal finance "experts" out there, but I may be able to add a tiny voice to that chorus with a slightly skewed perspective about living well in an expensive area of the country.