CoffeeBear.net

Reduce Your Spending

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

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.

Similar Posts

• How To Buy Your First Home
  In my younger days due to various employment situations, I ended up moving about once every five yea ...
• Grumpf
  *Grumpf* is my word for when I'm feeling just a slightly bit grouchy. Not enough to make me want to ...
• The Cat’s Meow
  Well, we took Capt. Jack to the vet this morning. He's got 4 teeth that need to be pulled. *ugh* Sti ...
• Reading eBooks
  My rating: 5 out of 5 I recently finished reading the last of my unread stack of books, took a look ...
• Weekend Update
  This update was partially delayed due to some problems with our domain name. And depending on what t ...