-> I Made A Stupid Money Mistake This Week.

The Setup

Well, if you thought us personal finance bloggers had it all together and never made silly money mistakes, this week I decided to prove you wrong. BIG TIME.

I had a busy week last week, and to top it all off, my wife was sick. When I wasn’t at work I was at home doing what I could to make her feel better. Making her soup, running to the store to get medicine and so forth.

When I was paying bills last week, I wasn’t paying as much attention as I normally do, and I made a boo-boo.

After paying our mortgage, funding the 401k, and paying the rest of the utilities I saw that we had over a thousand dollars left over in the main spending account to put into our vacation savings account. I remember thinking, “wow, this is great -now we’ll be going on that vacation sooner than I thought!”. I quickly transferred over $1050 to our savings account, leaving myself a balance of about $120 until payday 7 days later. That should be more than enough!

The Mistake

Well, over the weekend I got a notice in the mail telling me that I had overdrafted my account. Not just once, or twice, but three times! I was being charged $102 in bank charges by my wonderful bank!

The overdraft notification showed charges that I had made, and accounted for. Why was I receiving these bank charges when my account should have over $100 in it?

And then it hit me. I had forgotten about our homeowner’s association direct debit charge. The association bill was for $150. That would put me into the negative!

Normally I wouldn’t have forgotten that expense, but this month the auto-debit transaction in Microsoft Money hadn’t triggered, and the busyness of life just allowed me to forget it altogether. Now I have to pay a stupid tax for overdrafting my account when I had more than enough money in the bank to begin with.

I was able to call the bank and have all but $34 of the charges reversed, but the experience has still left a sour taste in my mouth. I just wish this bank had the free overdraft protection like my last bank did. That allowed me to avoid the stupid tax more than once.