I finally took my own advice and put my other foot down!

Ha! yes that is my stupid sense of humor kicking in.. bascially it's one of my work jokes.. I work up figures for mortgage closings, send them to a title co so they can take my numbers, the broker numbers, their numbers, etc and put them all together to come to a bottom line of what the borrower has to bring (or get back) to a closing. So the title closers will call and say "I'm having trouble balancing" and one of my comebacks is usually "did you put your other foot down, sometimes that helps" which normally is met by not only a good portion of my office roaring with laughter (I'm pretty loud people can hear me across the office, god help me in "personal matters") but either the person on the other end of the phone either snickering at me or just bluntly ignoring me because they are over the frusteration point enough to actually call me.. to which I am no help on their end.. it's bascially "here is how I balanced to my number" and I usually get the responce of "yeah I got that but I'm still off $4,000" umm yeah, you did something wrong on your end, not sure what BUT I have not one fee that is exactly that number and you have WAYYYY more fees than I have on my side PLUS every single one of these companies uses different software so depending on the type of fee and how it's paid varies. Anyway.. on to what my blog is about.. it is about balancing I swear to you.

So Friday marked the first day of my 3 day weekend ALONE with my husband with actually no plans.. for any of you who know me or have seen my calendar, not only are my weekends normally completely packed with sometimes 3 or more parties/events, but my weekdays have followed suite most of this summer as well.. having 3 days with no kids, no set in stone plans, just 3 days stretched before us.. well 4 for Tim considering he got Friday off as well. Lucky bastard. So one of the things we did plan on doing was tackling the room I'm in now.. the computer room... it has become the bowels of our financial disaster that we would love to ignore. Somehow over the years of marriage we have gone from making total peanuts and always having cash (I'm a total budget freak) to making gads and gads of ca$h not even knowing what to do with it paying every bill months before they were due to going back on the unbusy side of our businesses and not making anywhere near the amount we were accostomed to. It used to be, oh we have an extra $5,000 this month, I think we'll buy a new fence and pay cash or something of that nature.. now it's glee when we find a $1 in a jean pocket we had forgotten about.. but the situation has just completly downward spiraled to the point where we couldn't hold back our spending the way we did when we were first married and we had to go out and get a home equity loan, payoff all the credit cards, and bite the bullet. We are each *thinking* about 2nd jobs, but now with my work becoming busier again, I'm definately going to take full advantage of that. Somehow just with the home equity loan the $ stress has finally seemed to lift somewhat. We still *know* we owe the $ BUT we decided to get a few extra thousand and treat ourselves to a nice vacation before we get to the nitty gritty. So we booked ourselves a vacation to Punta Cana for $631 per person! All inclusive, air fare everything included! yes, I'm sooo the queen of cheap! lol!

Okay, so for whatever reason we were in the computer room by 8:30 yesterday morning merging the big piles into smaller piles and shredding things we didn't need. That went very well and actually much faster than I had expected. By the time we were done I realized I had a mountain of old bank statements that had never been reconciled. I used to be a whiz at this, loving to reconcile the checkbook since I was 10 and now the computerized version is so much faster and easier. So I get my mountain of papers together, but them all in order, go to my money program, open it, click balance this account.. yup it pops up with a date of NOVEMBER 2005! Okay, I knew I was behind on balancing the checkbook but that is nuts.. so of course somehow within the mountain of paper I'm missing which month???? ohhhhh yes, the month I need to start with.. as I'm wading through boxes and folders of old bank statements and what not, Tim yelling at me to just "grab it on line" umm yeah, it's not the same but of course he has no clue, he has written 5 checks in our entire marriage.. ya think he's ever balanced/reconciled a check book.. yeah not so much. So I just tell him I need it. (Okay if worse came to worse I could have done it off line, however it was the first month and in order to get started I needed that month and we currently have no printer so I'd be copying it to word so I didn't have to be on line) Okay.. now if I could just get my shit in order and actually figure out how to let my on-line bank account balance my checkbook on my computer, I'd be all good.. I know it's possible, but I am so worried the way that I set things up will not coincide with the way the bank wants to reconcile my account.. soooo anyway..

Tim finds the missing months by gods grace, thank you! Someone on the other side felt bad for him just long enough to guide him to the correct folder! lol! so I had from Nov 2005 to July 2007, I sat down, made a big cup of tea, turned on the tunes and every month only took be 5-10 minutes! I have no clue why I haven't been doing it... and really I thought I only had maybe 6 months tops to do.. So I get into it and finding for the most part I'm doing really well adding everything in, all the right $'s etc. The only thing that is wrong is that sometimes I was totally effing us by entering an atm withdrawl twice somehow, or that my automatic payment thing had shown up as paying our financial advisor twice one month (2 different amounts, the computer added 1 and I added the other but failed to realize BOTH were in there) then I had one time I put a check in the bank, never added it. We get direct deposit so it's strange for us to have to add checks.. so I added those. The only down fall where I was not taking out enough $ was a few places I missed the change by like 30 cents.. I entered a 4 instead of a 7 or something that.. nothing huge. But I get done and now we have a few extra hundred dollars I didn't know about BUT what is weird is my bank balance on line comes no where close to my new #! I don't get it. ughh well.. I just won't go overboard and spend it.

So there you have it.. I decided to take my advice and put my other foot down.. and being a LIBRA I think this whole balancing thing is very helpful to me feeing almost whole again! lol!