Educating the Wheelers

I should probably mention why we made the switch from me handling all the finances to Andrew primarily doing it.

The underlying answer is that motherhood of little ones takes your little mind and scatters it to the four winds.

We have our primary checking account which is still with our bank in Texas, but they don’t have any branches in Minnesota. So we opened an account locally where we could deposit physical checks. We don’t have too many of those, so we made that my “grocery money” account. I hardly ever checked it online, there was rarely more than a few hundred dollars in there, though I’d open the envelope and peek at the balance — generally not bothering to pull the thing out and look at the whole thing. (This becomes important later.)

Now, occasionally I would get the little fleeting thought that it was lower than it should be, which was immediately replaced by the guilt and shame of figuring I must have spent too much money. Because that’s just the kind of girl I am — something’s awry, and I’m already berating myself for everything I must have done wrong.

Anywhoo, fast forward a few months and this time I know something’s wrong because I haven’t *used* that card for some time and there should be more money in there. Turns out we had a slow leak — an effective strategy, really. As my dad always says: the successful parasite knows not to kill the host. If they had been taking more money out, I would not have just felt shame and guilt and moved on. I would have looked into it sooner!

So that’s what brought us to Quicken and obsessively tracking every penny.

Hey, it’s embarrassing enough to have to admit it here. But you can be sure it will never happen again.