How To Celebrate Your 25th Birthday With The Whole World

Two days ago I turned a quarter of a century old.  Everyone kept asking me how it felt and it was hard to come up with an answer.  Generally speaking 25 is the last “perk birthday” At 17 you can get your license, 18 you can vote, 21 you can drink and 25 gets you a significant reduction on your car insurance. (Or it would have if I owned a car.  Instead I celebrate not paying for gas, insurance, and maintenance.)  It also seems to mark a turning point in your life, “It’s time to stop messing around and start becoming an adult. You’re gonna be 30 soon!” but I really didn’t feel anything like that.

Birthday’s have never really been about getting older for me.  Instead I look at them as a reset button.  Since my birthday is so close to New Years I like to sit down and look at where I am.  I take a little inventory of my life and see where I want to go from here.  This year as I stopped letting my past predict my future I could be reborn in a sense.  I’m not who I was last year (not even who I was two days ago) so I wanted to express that and celebrate my birthday a little differently.

I Chose To Give Back

In the grand scheme of things I have an extremely blessed life.  I have lived in a good neighborhood, went to good schools.  I have never had to worry about not having food to eat or a place to sleep.  Most importantly to me I have a supportive and loving family and a really great group of friends.  No matter what happened in my life I have always had someone to help me get back on track. I wanted to celebrate this and to thank everyone who had been part of my first 25 years.

I decided that instead of going out to dinner and then to a bar or and spending an exorbitant amount of money I wanted to cook everyone dinner and celebrate the day with as many of my friends as I could. In the end I had about 25 people come over and help me turn a quarter of a century.  It was a fantastic night and though I didn’t get to cook (I was forbidden, actually) the food was great and everyone had a fantastic night!

A Chance To Help The World

I told everyone I didn’t want anything but I did ask them to help me achieve one of the items on my Bucket List - Help someone else achieve their dreams. I asked everyone instead of gifts to take a little of the money we would normally spend going out and help me start a Kiva donation account.  For anyone who doesn’t know Kiva is a micro-lending platform that allows anyone to give a loan (as little as $25) to an entrepreneur anywhere in the world, to help them start their business.  It has a great impact on the individuals who you lend to and their communities.  Once the loan is paid back you are free to lend the money again and help someone else.

As always my friends and family came in perfect form and we raised close to $500! I was blown away and extremely excited.  There are a few donations still heading my way so when everything is settled I’ll bump it up to an even $500 or $525 if we go over!  I am really thrilled to take the next few days and find amazing people to loan the money to.  It’s a great feeling to be able to not only give money away to charity, but to actually see who it goes to and how it will changes their lives.

My Kiva Lender Page is available to see who I will lend to. A few people have asked if they can donate as well; you can donate money through my PayPal account if you really want to, and I’ll let you know as soon as I move it into Kiva. I would rather see you start your own account and lend all on your own (Let me know if you do!!). Take a look here for tips on how to choose a good loan and the huge benefits of lending small amounts.

I would like to thank everyone who donated and celebrated with me and all of the readers on this site who make my time writing here great!

All pictures belong to me.  Thanks to Melissa for taking them during the dinner!