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! 😀
1 I track our finances using KMyMoney.