There comes a time in every girl's life when she must stop being a helpless twit and not let her Daddy handle car maintenance and taxes anymore. The former responsibility has therefore been passed on to the boyfriend (I like to call it delegation, and that's a leadership skill), and the latter duty was assumed about two years ago.

Now that I think I have taxes under the belt, I thought I ought to learn about equity mutual index fundsaldkfjaS?DFWAE:R?AWke

Sorry.

Alright, I am generally a very curious individual, and I want to know more about virtually anything new. This curiosity stops flat in its tracks when it comes to finances. A good friend works as a financiazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... sorry...I'm awake...he works to make rich people richer, basically, and whenever he talks about his job, he can't get three words into a sentence before I'm staring at his forehead counting pores.

So it was with great effort that I tried to educate myself about this mind-numbingly boring crap. My friend Tracey tipped me off to a website that explains a lot of this stuff in an entertaining way for short-attention-span liberal arts grads like myself. There was an article on IRAs that was actually helpful until, true to form, I got bored halfway through. But better still, they have these fun little calculators where you plug in numbers and it will answer questions such as "When will I pay off my credit card balance?" and "How much should I contribute to my IRA?"

However when the answer to those questions, respectively, is "Never" and "Half your monthly salary," the game gets a wee bit less fun. So back to Plan A of personal finance: "lalalallaalalIDON'THEARYOUlalalla"