Fool Me Twice

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Five Thanksgiving Days ago, Donna and I had a huge fight about money. I had, to that point, just let her manage our finances without much interference on my part. In fact, I had little idea about what our financial picture even looked like. That week I had gotten an unexpected call on my cell phone from a creditor.

"Mr. Dunn, we're calling about your account. You are seriously past due and we need a payment today."

"You'll need to talk to my wife, she manages our finances..."

"We've left several messages and have not been able to reach her. Mr. Dunn, can you make a payment today?"

This alone was pretty disconcerting. It had to be a mistake. Donna had given me no indication that we were having any trouble meeting our obligations and I had recently had a pretty significant raise at work. As far as I knew, everything was fine. Then my cell phone rang again.

"Mr. Dunn, this is your mortgage company. Your account is now 120 days past due."

That was the day before Thanksgiving. I didn't speak to her again until Friday afternoon.

"I will fix this and it will never happen again. Get all the bills together. You're going to tell me about every account and every creditor." I was livid. Mostly with myself. I make plenty of money and I should never have been so out of touch as to let this happen.

From this moment on I have kept meticulous track of our finances. I even opened a new checking account for Donna and budgeted a set amount of money she would receive each pay day. All our bills, accounts, debts, etc were all put into a spreadsheet where I could forecast how much money was going where and when.

Each payday, I sat with Donna and paid each bill from the spreadsheet and entered all our purchases and payments into the computer. We would enter any new bills into the spreadsheet and remove anything that was paid off. The procedure was simple enough and soon we were back on track.

I managed things this way until about six months ago. It was then that Donna told me she wanted to be trusted with the money a little more. I agreed. I turned over the spreadsheet to her.

Last week, the phone calls started again. In 3 days I have heard from 4 creditors. Twice, those calls have come to my office. When I checked on our main checking account to make some appeasement payments, I discovered that it is overdrawn.

It's a good thing there's not a major gift-giving holiday coming up or we'd be in real trouble right now.

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