People spend more time avoiding work than they do, working.
I tried, many years ago, to teach Mr. See how to balance the checking accounts and credit card charges. It was like teaching a dog Esperanto. I hindsight, I realized my error - I was trying to get him to learn the whole system, including that for my business, all at once. He not only had to balance the accounts, but enter client checks and apply them against invoices. I threw him into the deep end of the pool to see if he could swim, and he cried out for a life ring.
Well, we're retired now and our finances are a lot simpler. Nevertheless, there are still credit cards to track, bills to pay, and checking accounts to reconcile. And it always bugged me that if I died, how would Mark figure it all out? I mean, I suppose I would be dead and wouldn't care. And I suppose he would figure things out - people do what they have to do, to survive.
I tried to put together an "annual report" summarizing our net worth and whatnot. I have big binders for each of our investment accounts and whatnot (social security, etc.). Everything we own is in joint tenancy with right of survivorship. All he needs is like 30 copies of my death certificate (one for each vehicle, bank account, investment account, real property, life insurance policy, etc.) and once those are filed, it all transfers to his name only.
But still, it bugged me, that he had no real handle on our income and spending. And I knew that if I tried to get him to do it all, it would backfire in a big way - as it did before - and he would become even more financially phobic than before.
Then it struck me. We have two checking accounts. One is largely dormant with a bank here on the island. We keep it only because Bank of America fucked us once, while we were in the Canadian wilderness, by "suspending" our account because, after 15 years, they claimed not to know our citizenship - and they told us this in a letter send to our home. Big banks are great. Big banks suck, too. And the small, local bank here on the island would be more helpful to Mark if I was gone.
It also struck me that Mark has his own credit cards - taken out in his name - that we got specifically because all our previous cards were in my name as primary cardholder. We wanted to make sure he had credit established in his name, so again, if I died first (which is all-but-certain) he wouldn't be blindsided by credit card companies closing accounts. It happens, and we've seen many a widow flummoxed when her husband dies and she discovers their finances are a house of cards and the cars are all in his name (and the loans in his name) and the bank is calling the loans. The credit cards are cancelled (credit was in his name only) and in some cases, even the house was titled in his name alone (and mortgaged in his name, and left to his ex-wife or children in his will).
That's in addition to the dirty financial secrets hubby was concealing - mountains of debt that were serviced (just barely) by his social security and pension. But survivor's benefits and widow's pension are not enough to service the debt! We've seen this happen, and it is tragic. The widow doesn't end up homeless, but ends up in a pickle. Reverse mortgages play into this as well, not to mention loans on upside-down motorhomes or "underwater" boats.
Living on Old People Island is like training wheels for old age. But I digress, yet again.
So, anyway, I came up with the idea that if I set up a copy of Quickbooks on Mark's laptop (part of our fleet of reliable Toshiba C655 antiques) that had just the local bank and his credit card on it, he could easily balance those accounts on a daily basis. As part of this, I would get him to use his credit card for daily purchases, like groceries and gasoline, and my credit card would be used for paying house expenses and the like, such as cell phone bills, the water and sewer bill, and so on and so forth.
I say "his" and "mine" but we are each authorized users on the other's credit card account. And the checking accounts are joint as well. You'd be surprised how many couples - married for 50 years or more - have separate accounts and have no idea how much money and debt the other spouse has, until their spouse dies. It is pretty sad. Mark and I have no secrets - and no debt, either.
So I got this all set up and explained to him why I was doing it. He would need to know how to balance accounts and such in the event of my eventual demise. And he should know this stuff. Since I simplified it, he was more receptive. And after the usual initial learning curve, he jumped in with both feet. He quickly realized that it was essential to balance accounts daily - or as often as possible. You wait a week or two, and you have a dozen or more charges to enter and nothing adds up. And no, a "balance adjust" is a definite no-no! Why Quickbooks even allows this is beyond me - it seems like a one-way trip to IRS jail if you were using it for business.
A funny thing happened. He liked it. He liked having control over these accounts and knowing how much money was in the checking account and what the balance was on his credit card. And he quickly realized it took less than ten minutes every morning to log in and check things - while having that morning cup of coffee. He told me, "If I don't log in, I get anxious about what the balances are!" and I just smiled. Knowing where the money was and how much there was - and what we were spending it on - was actually more calming and less anxiety-inducing than "La, la, la, I don't want to know!" which so many people rely on as their means of financial planning.
So he is on auto-pilot now. The only disadvantage to this approach is that we now have two "companies" running in Quickbooks, and thus it is no longer possible for me to create a report, say, tracking our spending on gasoline for the last 15 years. But at this point, now that I have used such reports to learn about our spending, I have less need for them.
In addition to balancing accounts, I got Mark to deposit checks for his pottery sales and reimbursements from the arts association. It isn't hard to do - take a photo of the check using the bank's "app" and away you go. And again, the learning curve was a little steep, but now he doesn't need my intervention at all.
But this morning, something happened that made me chuckle a bit. His new credit card arrived, as the old one had expired. And on the front of the credit card is a sticker telling him to activate the card. In the old days, you did this with a phone call. But today, it is a QR code to an "app" or a website URL. And Mark, never having to have done this before, set it down on his desk to forget about it. It was too hard! It would involve learning! And learning is painful!
Learning should be painful, otherwise you learn nothing. You remember painful lessons twice as much as easy ones. I always get a laugh when well-meaning elementary school teachers or public broadcasting children's shows say "Learning is fun!" to little kids who know better. Learning is like broccoli. Fun is a bag of candy. As you get older, you appreciate broccoli more and candy a lot less, but the process can take time and it isn't "Fun!" like educators like to say.
Well, of course, activating a credit card is about as hard as falling off a log, so it was interesting to me to see how Mr. See was spending more time and effort not doing this simple task (putting it aside to "get to later") that just making a few keystrokes on a computer. So I nagged him into doing it and there was the usual kitty yawl back and forth. But he did it and realized it wasn't splitting the atom. And I chided him for spending more time not doing it than doing it. He didn't appreciate that!
But of course, I do the same thing. We all do. It is human nature to procrastinate. It must be some sort of weird survival skill. And in some cases, I guess, procrastination is a better approach. You put off a task long enough, you end up realizing it wasn't worth doing - and thus optimize your use of labor to that which has to be done today. Deadlines and last-minute rush tend to prioritize what needs to be done, not what would be nice to do if we had endless time. So maybe procrastination has some sort of function in our brains - besides information hoarding, that is.
I guess too, that if you make a hasty decision on something, you may later regret it. So waiting around until the last minute allows you more time to consider all options, including doing nothing, which is always an option and sometimes the best option, particularly for governments.
I have read articles that claim that one reason animals sleep is that it is a survival skill. The woodland mouse who stays snug in his burrow all night long is less likely to be eaten by an owl. Not only that, if animals were active all the time, they would be more likely to get into trouble. So maybe procrastination feeds into that - inaction is safer than action.
This makes me wonder whether these websites and webinars telling people they can "cure" procrastination are of any value. This seems to be part and parcel of the human existence, perhaps going back to when we were single-celled amoebas, which come to think of it, don't do much all day long.
The actual amount of work humans need to do to survive is far less than the amount they actually do. And often this surplus labor is put to work in the service of others, who profit from it. That pisses off a lot of the young people today, who feel they are working long and hard to earn barely enough to survive, while others literally profit from their labor. Then again, I felt the same way when I was that age, and now am living off my investments. Get back to work, slackers! I need them dividend checks!
Just kidding, but maybe that is another aspect of procrastination as well - doing the absolute minimum to get by, rather than overworking yourself. So-called "Quiet Quitting" is nothing new, eh?
