Reduce Your Spending

Like many Amer­i­cans who get their taxes done early, my wife and I recently received our fed­eral income tax refund. As soon as I noticed it had arrived, I moved it over from check­ing to sav­ings. And as I like to try our finances on my com­puter1, I reg­is­tered the trans­fer of funds from check­ing to sav­ings imme­di­at­ley. Then for the rest of the month I won­dered why the bank kept show­ing us as hav­ing so very much more money in our check­ing account than my com­puter did. Mostly I thought it was due to some checks not hav­ing been cashed yet (e.g. the mort­gage pay­ment). In any case, I trusted my fig­ures bet­ter than the banks as my fig­ures would include those uncashed checks.

Then in today’s snail mail was the paper copy of our bank state­ment. This evening I sat down and rec­on­ciled our check­ing account and low, I spot­ted a rather large over­sight on my part. I for­got to reg­is­ter the deposit of our income tax refund. Whoops! Once I did that my fig­ures and the bank’s sud­denly looked a lot closer than they had and I felt much, much bet­ter about our finances.

Moral of the Story#1: If you don’t want to spend money, assume you don’t have it.
Moral of the Story#2: Always be sure to enter all your deposits as well as your with­drawls! :D

1 I track our finances using KMy­Money.

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About Mark McKibben

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

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