About TMD

The Money Drain is a site dedicated to sharing user-submitted financial mistakes, success stories, and keeping the consumer updated on news appropriate for the general consumer.  So feel free to submit your financial fails so that we can all learn from each other and (hopefully) not repeat the same mistakes.

This site is run by Crystal Groves, a full-time web developer from the MD/PA area.  She has a passion for personal fiscal responsibility, the environment, old ford trucks, farming, and her pittbull “Bastian”.  You can get to know her on her site, crystalgroves.net.

Why a site about financial fails?

I’ve found in my years of hard work fixing my own financial situation that there are two things that inspire people to fix their finances and get out of debt.

  1. Seeing other people successfully fix their finances
  2. The shock value of watching other people make big financial mistakes

The Money Drain is intended to provide both. Mostly financial fails to show people what not to do, but also success stories to attempt to inspire people to fix their situation by hearing stories from real people about how it is possible.

In 2005 when I really decided to straighten my financial life out, there were two things that woke me up.

  1. I could not buy a car because of my 525 credit score (now 778), and was driving a 1978 full-size Ford Bronco that got 15mpg and was costing me $80/week in gas after Hurricane Katrina hit. I thought to myself “How am I supposed to take care of myself, let alone my disabled father, if I can’t even buy a freakin car??”
  2. I started keeping track of every penny that went in and out of my accounts and noticed that in a year and a half I had spent $3,000 on Schwan’s Food Delivery service. I never would have realized the excess of that had I not started keeping track.

The more I started blogging about all the things I was doing to fix my situation, the more my family and friends or random blog readers started commenting about how I was inspiring them to do the same. After all, no one else is going to fix our situation but ourselves, and there’s no reason why we can’t learn from each other and support each other to keep moving forward.

That is why I started this site, because of all those people that said I was helping inspire them.  I went from someone who was extremely careless about her finances to someone who was very passionate about not only fixing her own, but helping others realize that they can too.

12 Responses to About TMD

  1. Pingback: Success Story: How I Went form 525 FICO to 780 Fico | The Money Drain

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