Doing The Numbers

I have never been someone who is comfortable with numbers. I understand their utility, but I've never gotten much satisfaction from them. To this day, I don't really understand people who do. In fact, when I first met my wife, she told me that she was a math major, and I thought 'well, this is someone I won't have much in common with'.

But over the years, I have found a certain amount of pleasure in getting things to add up -- in particularly, checking accounts. I'm usually surprised to find that there are people who can't balance their checking account. Surely, I think, they could, they just don't want to. And then I found that my wife has difficulty with that, and I had to rethink why that might be the case. Its not a fear of numbers, certainly, and its not an inability to do it -- so what is it? And now I think that part of it might well be that the bank, itself, doesn't go out of its way to make balancing simple to do. They assume that of course anyone can do it; how hard can it be, and so they give you the basic numbers, and thats it. If -- as happens with my wife -- you get slammed when an unexpected automatic deduction occurs, they shrug and say well, you should have known that was going to happen; you should have made provision for it. I had a roommate once who always rounded his checks up, when recording them -- if the check was for seven dollars and eighty one cents, he recorded it as eight dollars -- so that, so long as he never went negative on the register, he'd know he had enough money in the account to cover checks. That never made sense to me.

Of course, when you do have a banking problem, banks seem to regard it as an opportunity to make more money. One month, my wife had three overdrafts in a row - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Fortunately, our bank - a credit union - just transfers money from savings to cover it (as well as sending you a crisply written letter -- snail mail), so it isn't a big deal, but still -- guys, when the first one is needed, don't you think its possible that I'd want to know right away? So we can keep any more from surprising us? And, of course, a regular bank will then charge you an Overdraft Fee, each and every time. Credit card companies will take your payment and apply it such that the payment covers their fees, first -- and only then what the fee is based on, so if you happen to have underpaid the bill -- as I did once -- you can go for two or three months, generating fees, before you notice. Do they tell you? Of course not -- they're in the business of earning money, not helping you out.

Yesterday, at the lunch, I asked a former coworker how she handled recording all those micro-share stock purchases, and she just grimaced. Apparently, I dodged a bullet on that one; I told them to send dividend checks, and so I got 1099's for them. She had told them to reinvest the dividends (which actually makes more sense), and as a result, her tax return requires her to show how much every dividend was, and how much stock she held each and every time . She said she was seriously considering not reporting it -- not because she wanted to hide it, but because the keepers of the records made it so difficult to answer the questions.

Of course, she could always ask the IRS for help. Ho, ho, ho.

Numbahz. They'll get you, one way or another.