I'm weird about money.
Like really weird.
Growing up, if I got an allowance or money as a gift from a holiday, I filed it away. Literally.
I have envelopes that I labeled with things like "Fun", "Gifts", and "Savings". I actually used money I got as gifts for gifts. If that's not generous, I don't know what is.
Once I started working my first job at age 15, I continued with my envelopes, though my mom also opened a checking account for me. There I accumulated my spending money for a school trip to France.
When I started driving, I use an old wallet in my dashboard to hold $20 from every pay check to pay for my gas. Which was enough, then, at $1.09 a gallon.*
Through college my money keeping wasn't too complicated because, well, I didn't make that much and what little I did make went to driving to work**, car insurance, and food.
In graduate school is when I became more sophisticated*** with my personal money management. Ever a lover of Excel, I drafted a money spreadsheet and showed it to my coworker and sort-of mentor to look over. She let me know where my estimations were wild and where they made sense.
I saved for a year in advance to buy the first car purchased by me, just so I'd have enough for a downpayment and enough every month, saved, to pay for half of my payment as I made my way through graduate school on an assistantship. I'd say my planning paid off.
And then I discovered Emigrant Direct. You know it? It's like ING Direct. Basically a high-yield savings account that can be directly connected to your regular checking and/or savings account that allows you to set up one-time or regular transfers for saving. Free, too. I highly recommend it. And, what was better about it was that you could have one account with a bunch of smaller accounts - like envelopes! - within it. So I could log on with one user name and then see allllll of my little accounts, like Savings, Vacations, Gifts, Retirement, House, etc.
And boy did I wear those out. I was wondering if it would ever tell me that I had reached my max, but I hadn't. I loved that system except for one thing - it took a few days to transfer money back and forth, which I didn't like. I'm a child of the now generation. Okay, well not quite, but almost. And I wanted my money transferred now.
I could have carried on using Emigrant Direct except that, with the purchase of our home, J and I decided it would be a good time to combine finances. If I could give you a glimpse into the sets and sets of spreadsheets I've created for that monumentous occassion, you'd lose it. I admit, I'm insane.
And I even got excited the other day when I could set up our automatic payments for OUR accounts, and my friend D thought I was absolutely crazy. She was like, "you're excited to set up bill payments? I don't get it." I just love managing money. I should have been an accountant.
So now all of our money is in our regular accounts - no more Emigrant Direct except for some long-term saving. And while I'm a bit sad to leave Emigrant Direct, I'm happy to have new accounts to manage.
Any other weird money quirks I should know about?
*And that was in 2001. Can you believe it was so cheap?
**What a waste. Working to get money to drive to work?
***At least, that's how I like to think of it. My friends and family think of it as crazy.
