Money Madness

I can’t put it off any longer. Tonight I must sit down and balance the checkbook. The receipts have been stacking up, the debit card is looking worn out, and the bills are starting to menace me from their shelf above the computer. I’m also a little scared by what I see on our online account balance, because, well, I thought we had more than that at the moment.

In our family, I’ve always been the money manager. Aaron will admit without any shame that he has a serious allergy to money: when given any, he will buy stuff as quickly as possible to get it away from him. He also dislikes the tedious task of entering each transaction into the register and tracking what has cleared and what hasn’t. I love balancing the checkbook, however. Thanks to the beauty of Microsoft Money, I can track when bills are due, enter transactions with ease, and run fun reports showing me just where all of our money is going. Well, mostly fun reports; seeing that much of our money goes to gas, fast food, and Aaron’s comics isn’t so much fun.

When we were living together in years BC (Before Cordelia), I’d sometimes balance the checkbook every day. I’d collect the day’s receipts, enter them, pay any bills that we got in the mail the day before, and reconcile everything with the online account summary. I’d check off each transaction as the bank processed it, smug in knowing that every penny was accounted for.

That doesn’t happen so much anymore. I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but suddenly managing the money is much more difficult. There are stacks of receipts in the little box next to my computer, waiting to be entered.

And then there are the receipts that never make it to the box, causing me to curse under my breath while adding an entry for a purchase I have no memory of.

The bills, which at one time barely left the mailman’s hands before they were paid, are now living a dusty life of days or weeks on the computer desk before they are given any attention.

In October, I (somehow) was late on 75% of our bills. Before this, I had never once, in my entire life, missed a payment deadline. Never! Not even when I was a drunk sorority girl in college!

How did one little baby cause me to fall so far? Well, my time is certainly more precious these days. I can no longer agonize over Microsoft Money, trying to figure out if tickets to wrestling should be categorized as Cultural Event or Sporting Event.

Any time that Cordelia is awake makes it impossible to balance the checkbook, since if I stopped in the middle of adding receipts, I’d never remember where I was. I’m now forced to do my financial duties at night, when she is asleep, but this often means I’m so tired that I don’t give a damn and put it off for another night. And so two weeks will go by before I’ll even glance at the receipts box again, which by that time makes the job a full-hour of entering data and marking off items that have cleared.

To add to the “joy”, we also don’t have nearly as much money coming in now that I am working part-time, which makes it even more important to keep a close eye on our account balance.

Oh how I miss those days of running reports and casually balancing the checkbook each day. But thanks to my lack of time and forgetful mommy brain, I consider it a good month when we make most of the bill payments on time and don’t fall into the red in the checking account.