Confession:  I’m the worst with keeping on top of stuff, particularly paperwork.  I attempt to get it organized, but I’ve never developed a great system for keeping up with our financial paperwork.  Quicken helps, especially the newest version, but there is still a monotony to it, and I avoid things that are monotonous.  Plus, I get frustrated when I do get around to it.

For example, yesterday I spent the day catching up on account reconciling in Quicken, matching up credit card statements, etc.  My husband generally pays the bills, so he looks over the purchases for anything out of the ordinary, but it takes me months sometimes to actually finalize things in our software.  I realized in the middle of it that I was missing a statement from the beginning of February.  Not surprising since it’s right about the time we moved, and was probably forwarded in the mail.  We probably paid the bill before getting the statement (or perhaps never received it, who knows?).  Anyway, I go to our online access.  Naturally they don’t have statements available online from any further back than April.  So then I call them.  Enter numbers, go through the phone tree, hold down the zero until I get a live person, then give her all the information again that I just typed into the phone to verify who I am and that I have a right to talk to her.  I ask to have a new copy of the statement sent.  She tells me it will cost $2.50 (ok, I can live with that, it’s a small price to pay for my disorganization!) and that only the primary cardholder can request one.  Seriously?!?!?!?  I am obviously on the card, she verified everything!  I am allowed to use the card to purchase things up to our credit limit (not that I would).  But I can’t make a $2.50 charge to get a new statement?  What if my husband was in the military, serving overseas?  What if he was in the hospital?  What if he died?  Ok, none of those are true, but if I’m a cardholder, why can’t I request this information?  It seems really stupid to me.

Ok, rant over.  I know that this is part of the process of me learning to take care of things as they come in rather than waiting until there is a mountain to sift through.  Had I done this two months ago, the statement would have been available online.  So today I’m going to work on filing things, and hopefully counteract my perfectionist tendancies so that I can just get stuff into files and be able to find it in the future.  I don’t need to have fancy typed tabs and color-coding.  Whenever I do those complex things I just end up making more work for myself and the system breaks down anyway.  So today I’m just going to file.  No bells and whistles, just files.