The Balancing Act

I've attempted to blog twice since yesterday evening, but until now, all attempts have failed. Dan and I had a great weekend full of Texas Hold'em, Scrabble, Blockbuster and the Olympics, which I really wanted to write about. I even took pictures of the Scrabble boards, after receiving a royal @ss kicking from Dan in game two.

Game 1
Final Score: Sambo 294 Dan 304 What a close call!


Game 2
Final Score: Sambo 247 Dan 418 I got the Scrabble smack down!



Well, anywho, there's my elaborate fun weekend in a nutshell. Today I came home with a headache after school and thought it'd be relaxing to blog before doing anything, so I got the computer all set up and ready to go. Then I decided I should open the mail first to see if there was anything important. After discarding the usual junk mail, I came across an unexpected letter from the bank. The letter stated that Dan and I had accumulated over one-hundred dollars in overdraft fees! My initial reaction was anger because Dan and I are very careful with our check book and recording transactions. I'm so meticulous with it that I used to balance our transactions before even leaving the actual store when using the debit card. After giving into the realization that it wasn't the safest thing to do, not to mention a tad neurotic, I broke that habit. After reading the brief bank notice umpteen times, I finally called the customer relations service who basically just spat out numbers and was not really any help.

Dan called me on his way home from work very cheery...until I gave him the bank news. Dun, dun, dun!! No longer was he so eager to get home from work and really, I couldn't blame him. We both knew a trip to our local bank branch, which is past the railroad tracks, in traffic was necessary. So we hopped in the car and made it to the bank without getting stopped by a train! Whoooppeee!!! ;) To make a long story short, the very sweet young banker woman told us we had to go back to our bank statements and check the banks balance with our own. Simple task, right? WRONG!!! Although Dan and I were complimented today for keeping such great track of our bank statements and a chronologically correct check book, we were not given an A+ for checking which checks have cleared on our monthly bank statements. This has never been a problem for us before because we always just deduct any check amounts/debits immediately from our running balance after funds are used. To find where the numerical error occurred, Dan and I have been going over bank statements since about 6:00p.m.!! It is now almost 11:00p.m. and we quit doing it about a forty-five minutes ago. We started with February 2006 and stopped for the night when we hit June 17, 2005!! Although it this has been a very aggravating process, we're both glad it happened because we are finding little mistakes here and there that we miscalculated. Those damn ATM fees a were popping up left and right! Even though we recorded the fee from using another bank's ATM, there was another fee that didn't come up when using the ATM, and only showed up on the bank statement. Those snakey ATM slime balls!
I must admit though, it's been kinda fun looking back to see what we've spent our money on.

Anywho, it's getting late and I'm sooooooo tired. I feel like all Dan and I did today was crunch numbers and read bank statements. Little by little we are discovering that our check book is more of a B than A+. Unfortunately when I come home from work tomorrow I have to start balancing again from June 2005...Dan's teaching night school-that lucky man! It felt good to vent a little bit, thanks for reading. I'll keep you updated on our progress. Buenos noches! ;)