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Home
and Family
The Monthly Double-Take
by Rosally Saltsman
Every month we get reams of paperwork with numbers on it
thrust in our mailboxes: bills, salary slips, credit card
statements, bank statements, receipts, payment due, payment
received, income tax, municipality tax, Bituach Leumi,
charity appeals, rebates, vouchers, coupons, a mountain of
paperwork. But do we climb that mountain? I know a few
meticulous people who do conquer it, but for most of us, we
have children to raise, jobs to go to, a home to manage,
chessed to tend to. Who has time to balance checkbooks
and double check statements?
I just lost an hour of my time trying to straighten out my
cell phone bill. I had been noticing that I get four
different bills for my cell phone, but glancing at it one
month, I figured it was a computer error or that they had
sent me different parts of the same bill in different
envelopes. This month I looked closer. They have been
charging me for a service on a phone I never use, and on the
phone I do use, they have been charging me a total of over
forty shekels a month for two services I had never asked for
and I didn't want. They didn't have a record of my returning
the phone I took abroad and were continuing to charge me for
it. For the first two, this had been going on for almost a
year. If I had taken the five minutes to look over the first
bill I had received from the company properly, I could have
saved an hour, the cost of a fax, several hundred shekels and
all the aggravation to my precious peace of mind.
It's true that it's hard work to keep track of all
expenditures and even the modest among us who have very few
running accounts fall victim or prey to these kind of errors.
Computers make mistakes, people make mistakes, and companies
take advantage of this nonchalant attitude some people have
for money management to charge for things and then later
place the responsibility on the client for not having said
they didn't want the service. The cell phone company informed
me that it would be reimbursing me for only one month for the
services I hadn't been using, since after I had been charged,
I had not complained. [Many bills and bank statements
actually state that they do not accept responsibility for
complaints after X amount of time.]
Organization is the answer. We need to keep a record of all
money we spend, when we spend, how we spend it and to whom we
spend it in how many installments we spend it. We need a
desk, a file box, a binder, a folder to constantly keep track
of where our money is going. We work hard to earn it; Hashem
entrusts it to our responsbility and He expects us to guard
it wisely. And He tests our trustworthiness by having created
bureaucracy. True, it's annoying to have to double check our
accounts and expenditures but we are not only saving
ourselves from losing money but saving ourselves or someone
else from theft. In the same way the most G-d- fearing
restaurant manager has a mashgiach for matters of
kashrus, we have to be the mashgichim in matters
concerning our money. If we keep separate folders or plastic
pockets or whatever for tzedoka requests and receipts,
bills for the house, credit card accounts, bank statements,
car repairs, checks, salary slips, guarantees on new
appliances or on service repairs -- and we can be creative
about how we divide up these economical entries -- we'll not
only be saving money but time as well. We'll know who owes us
money and to whom we owe money.
Do you, for example, know how many standing bank orders
(horaot keva) you have and when they expire? We'll
have at our fingertips the receipt we need, the bill we paid,
the cancelled check, the date of the bank deposit, the
guarantee, and the voucher for the vacation we need to take
after coping with all of this.
I've got to admit that I have no one to blame but myself. I
should have paid more attention. And bli nedder, in
the future, I will. Who knows how much money I've lost,
underpaid, and overpaid over the years? Whatever it comes to,
I've paid a high price for my cavalier behavior but now it's
double(check) or nothing.
[Ed. Two tips on easier filing: fold sale receipts, bank
receipts and other important papers FACE OUT for quick
identification. Secondly, use transparent plastic folders for
each type of filing and MARK with thick magic marker.]
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