Fear of Posting

I have a great fear of being totally honest when writing since this is supposed to be an anonymous blog. There are so many details in my life that are very unique and I fear posting about them all would make it super obvious who the author is to any friends or co-workers stumbling upon this.

I also am exposed to a lot of information that I think would be of interest to my readers and my target audience through my job, but of course, I want to keep those items a secret. A lot of those things are open information available to anyone who wishes to pursue it. But some topics are so specialized that I would fear my colleagues doing a search on a specific intricacy related to the financial services industry and finding my post if I actually wrote about it.

Here is something I wanted to write about, but didn't publish earlier because of my fears. Also, my blog postings are often more generic that I would like them to be due to my fear of being made known.

Last year I had the opportunity to go on an international business trip. My husband was able to tag along – basically for free. He stayed in my hotel room and we were able to get my company to reimburse his airfare. I’m really happy that we were able to get his airfare reimbursed, but it did come at a taxable cost to us. Rather than flying business class, as company policy allowed, I flew coach class. My ticket plus my husband’s ticket was less than the cost of one business class ticket, so our vacation also saved the company money! We were able to save on food costs by getting food at the grocery store. Some of our money saving tendencies really are habits, so we don’t even think twice about them. I think in the end, my meal allowance more than covered the cost of our food. I realized after the trip was over that we didn’t even go out for one nice dinner! We would go to semi-nice dinners, but it was almost always less than the cost of my meal allowance for one person. We also ended up taking quite a bit of money out of the ATMS (we were in multiple countries). My main tip on foreign ATM usage is to try and take all the money you’ll need once to save those pesky fees from adding up. We got charged an out of network fee, plus conversion fees, plus who knows what else. In the end since the trip didn’t really cost us anything, I didn’t sweat these small one time charges too much, but as someone who almost never gets charged ATM fees (I think I used one out of network ATM in the U.S. in my life) it was shocking to see my money being eaten away by fees!