Stooooooopid
We do most of our normal purchasing with an AmEx card. We get points, and we're working toward earning some rewards. Anyway, that means we need to make regular payments. We've not been great about that, so we end up making semi-regular large payments instead.
Last week, knowing that I needed to pay off D's business AmEx (it gets paid out of his reimbursements from work, earns more points than our personal card, and cannot carry a balance), I logged in to the site. I saw that the personal card was due in a few weeks and thought I should pay a chunk of that. D was off at the bank making a deposit (and withdrawing cash for our carnival excursion), so I added that to Quicken and proceeded to make a quite large payment on the personal card as well as the nearly-as-large payment on the business card. And then I checked our bank balance.
Hmmm, something's not right here. How can it be so different from Quicken? I look through the transactions. Oh no. I had missed inputting our mortgage check (I thought it was already there) into Quicken. And our mortgage check isn't some small sum like $50, of course. Sick feelings began to pervade my tummy.
D comes home from his banking, and he tries to get AmEx to cancel the transaction. Sorry, they can't do anything once the Submit button is clicked. He calls the bank. No, nothing can be done as they can't see the transaction. (We found out Monday that they could have seen the transaction, had they known where to look.) But it was a moot point, since they require 72 business hours' notice on automatic payments. (No, I'm not sure how that's possible since by definition, automatic payments go through almost immediately; only scheduled payments would be affected.)
Oh, dear. And then everything hit Monday evening. Not just the two large AmEx payments, but also two checks we'd written to our church the week before (yes, that means eight days previously but not cashed until our own personal Black Monday). Ugh.
We were quite thankful for the overdraft protection our account has in place, as it kept any of our payments from bouncing. And we were also thankful that the money keeps coming in so we could repay that overdraft protection account immediately and move on.
We live and we learn. And sometimes while we live, we're stoooooopid.
