New Year’s Screwup…

Why? Why can’t any of the best-laid plans EVER go right, just once?

To cover my various expenses and bills while I was employed, I set up three “cookie jar” bank accounts, one to pool all incoming revenues, one for electronic fund transfers and the few checks to workmen I write, and one to hold my monthly credit-card budget. Paychecks came into the one for electronic fund transfers; a flat amount went out of that into the “pool,” and from there amounts needed for EFTs (utility and insurance payments), checks, and credit-card bills were disbursed to their respective cookie jars.

Complicated? You bet. But it worked.

The middle of last month, I went in to the credit union branch on the Main campus and sat down with one of the account managers to cancel those transfers, since incoming revenues will no longer cover those transfers and since I intend to simplify my banking by eliminating all these cookie jars and paying all bills out of the original EFT checking account. I swear to God, I watched her cancel those things! She confirmed it by showing me on her computer screen where all the scheduled transactions were CANCELED. No more. Dead transactions. Stiff parrots, one and all!

One of these transfers was triggered by the arrival of my ASU paycheck. However, the credit union can make only two such transactions in a month; in the two months of each year that PeopleSoft issued its bogus “extra” paycheck generated by ripping us off with bimonthly pay periods, I had to make the third transfer from the EFT account into the Pool account manually.

My last paycheck from GDU indeed arrived on one of those “extra” paydays. So, even if I hadn’t canceled the transfers, no transfer should have occurred when that check hit my account.

Moving forward with the simplification agenda, on December 31, after confirming that all my outgoing transactions had cleared, I moved all of the funds remaining in Pool and Credit Card Budget over to the EFT checking, planning to close the latter two accounts and two others, leaving only three accounts to have to reconcile each month (EFT, Tax & Insurance Savings, Emergency Savings). It seemed safe to do that, since no more automatic transfers would happen.

Wrong.

Early this morning, after I’d just turned out of bed and before even stumbling into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee, I happened to look at my online account. God damn it!

They’d transferred $1522 out of the incoming account into Pool, $840 back to EFT, and $682.18, the entire amount remaining in Pool, to Money Market Checking. Meanwhile, despite American Express’s announcement that it received this month’s payment, the check I wrote to AMEX last week still hasn’t cleared. Fortunately, Money Market Checking has plenty to cover it, and fortunately, because I’ve been living below my means for these past many years, I had transferred $20,000 from all those cookie jars into that main “Pool” checking account, preparatory to sending most of it off to Stellar for investment. So the $1522 transfer barely dented that.

But because there are so many other automatic transfers scheduled (all of which should have been canceled) into so many other accounts, I had to sift through eight accounts to determine that these were the only three fuck-ups and no overdraft fees had been incurred. It took two hours to do that, to enter the errors and their fixes into Quicken, and to e-mail the credit union explaining what happened, what was supposed to happen, and what they need to do to fix it.

It’s now 11:30. I haven’t had breakfast. The dog hasn’t been fed. I haven’t written the post that I sat down to write in the first place. The newspaper is still sitting in the driveway (assuming no one has stolen it yet). I have a migraine that remains to be treated with a large dose of caffeine. Half my day is gone, after I’d intended to prune the roses (a half-day job) and write my 102 syllabi (another half-day job).

Wasting my time fixing someone else’s screw-ups seems to be the eternal story of my life. A friend in banking once remarked that mediocrity is the standard of the business world. She wasn’t kidding.