In the comments section of last week’s Business post, I heard this question a couple of times over: how does one learn how to budget? So, my lovely readers, I’ve returned with a few thoughts on the subject, and the promise of more details on the horizon.

Why the #@&$ do I need a budget?

Let’s be honest: budgeting doesn’t sound like a very sexy undertaking. Why even bother?

It boils down to this: most of us don’t have a lot of money to throw around. (See: Great Recession. Employment insecurity. Depressed salaries. Exorbitant student loan balances. Widening wealth gap. Sound familiar?) What we do have, then, we need to spend intentionally, in order to maximize our financial security and our enjoyment of life.

Like it or not, budgeting is the practice of intentional spending. Handling your money with intention helps you emphasize things that are important to you, cast aside the things that aren’t, and help you stay afloat next time you’re faced with a financial tsunami.

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The one downside of dispatching with all your student loans? When you emerge debt-free on the other side, you have to figure out a new set of motivations for your financial life. Not that I have much money to throw around, even now, but I’m a very intention-driven person: with one goal gone, another must follow.

With a huge chunk of my paycheck back in my pocket, safe again from the grubby fingers of Sallie Mae, I started to mull over what I wanted my money to do for me. And I wasn’t content to consider the question as a false dichotomy (splurge on luxuries with the excess, or hoard it for a rainy day?). After much thought, I came up with a mission statement for my money: I was going to invest in myself.

One aspect of investing in yourself is pretty stodgy-sounding, albeit important: socking away money in emergency and retirement savings. Those two things are the first things I do with my paycheck every month. And I’ll definitely sit you down here at some point, hand you a stiff drink, and talk to you about the intricacies of both of them.

But honestly, I think the other kind of investment in yourself—the kind where you figure out what you’re passionate about and educate the hell out of yourself to make yourself proficient in it—that’s the hard one. That’s harder than determining a proper 401(k) investment allocation, or setting up automatic deposits to your savings account. It requires you to dig down deep in yourself, ask some difficult and painful questions about why you’re here on this earth, and then believe in the answers—even, or especially, if they scare you. Most importantly, it then requires you to become the first investor in an (unproven) venture based on that dream.

But if you do it right, I think you could be the safest investment you ever made.

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If you haven’t read the lead-in to this post, do that now for some helpful context.

I guess you could condense my story this way: Girl meets student loans. Girl feels uncomfortable being in a draining, entirely one-way relationship with said debt. Girl kicks debt to the curb as fast as possible, so she can hang out with her cooler friends instead.

Like most 2009 college grads, my student loans went into repayment in January of 2010. I had a balance of $14,925. By mid-February of 2011, I’d finished paying off that scarily large number (plus about $1,000 in interest). I’d like to say this was made possible by my glamorous six-figure job. But let’s be honest: the economy had just tanked, my salary was fair, though not generous, and I lived in a frustratingly expensive city.

The secret sauce in my success story was determination, which I acted on with focused intensity.

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Okay, then: enough wistfulness about the home I’m currently stuck with. On to the empowering stuff!

In post-graduate life, a huge part of making a home for oneself involves striving for (and attaining) financial independence. While making my own money and paying my own bills was the biggest adjustment to life in the real world, it was also one of the most rewarding ones. Managing my own money is part of what I think of as the business of home—a household, after all, being the smallest (and one of the most important) economic units in society. In my little household, student loans have been a big part of the financial story thus far, and I want to talk about them here with you.

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On the way back from work tonight, my usual route met me with its usual, miserable traffic jam. But this time, the cause was different. Instead of the normal volume-related pileup, tonight’s roads were clogged because someone had abandoned his car in the middle of Route 7. I reached, then passed the darkened vehicle eventually, but glancing at it sideways, I didn’t feel one twinge of annoyance. Honestly, I couldn’t really blame the guy.

Because I know what it’s like to feel like cutting and running, too. I’m confined all day by claustrophobia-inducing cubicle walls, y’all. There’s that aforementioned and predictably atrocious commute, plus a no-longer-homey apartment (it hasn’t been the same since my neighbor’s bedbugs invaded my own four walls. Yeah, let’s not talk about that). I have big plans in the works, of course, ones that (fingers crossed) will change all of the above. And I promise you’ll hear about them when the time is right. But until the day my lease is up, I’ve resolved to find inspiration in the parts of my life I still control.

Recently, I’ve found hope in the posts of two new-to-me blogs. At Makeunder My Life, Jess Constable has written about creating a home in the way that Michelangelo created his statue of David. (“It is easy,” he apparently said of sculpting a masterpiece from a boulder. “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”) Instead of finding peace in consumption, Jess talks about finding it through “exfoliating” unnecessary possessions, making her home’s trash-to-treasure ratio more favorable by subtracting, not adding. John and Sherry Petersik, over at the very fun home blog Young House Love (represent, Virginia!), seem to share a similar philosophy. It’s encapsulated in this post on living happily with less. And from their (very smart) posts on frugality, I’ve been inspired to start using and enjoying the things I already have—everything from pantry items to that long-ignored Netflix subscription.

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As March turns to April, almost everything gets better. The air temperature is more predictable, the days are longer and sunnier, and D.C.’s cherry blossoms signal new beginnings. There’s cause for organized celebration, too: Passover and Easter are on the horizon! Back at school, this was the time when Georgetown’s front lawn filled up with picnic blankets, lounging students, and frisbee players. In those carefree days, April meant pure, unadulterated happiness.

In the real world, I suppose, it also signifies that your tax return is coming due. I’m a first-time filer, which means I finally make enough money (yay!) for the IRS to want to keep tabs on me (eek). This made for a Sunday filled with just a little more tooth-grinding than I generally enjoy. (If the title of this post doesn’t ring a bell, check out this Beatles classic for some mood music.) TurboTax soothed my obsessive fretting, though, and I realized I’d be getting a payday I hadn’t accounted for. Totally worth a few lost hours of creativity!

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