The family accountant

STIPIMM: “Downtown” by Petula Clark

Those of you who know me probably have some inkling of my proclivity to keep track of my finances. Most of you probably don’t know, however, exactly how deep it runs. My dearest Bridget is finding out these things first-hand, with mixed results.

Almost 10 years ago, my friend Justin wrote a song about me called “The Diarist,” in which he examines my then-desire to keep a written record of every day, trying to keep it fresh in my mind.

“When you think of all the wasted time
The days we lost in the traffic lines
Of pen and page and worn-out rhymes –
Oh God, I’m going to lose my mind.”

In other words, if you spend too much time trying to keep hold of the past, you’ll sacrifice living in the present.

After I graduated from college, I stopped journaling quite so much, and the need to record daily life seemed to fade.

But in fact, it only transformed. It started when I lived in France, when I kept a detailed ledger of all the francs I spent and what I spent them on. I still have it; thumbing through it is one quick way of reliving some of the experiences there, or at least the materialistic experiences.

After college, faced with the actual necessity of keeping track of my personal finances for the first time, I followed my father’s example and purchased Quicken, a software program that basically serves as an electronic ledger.

I was quicken-ly hooked. It wasn’t the recording of the income and expenses that really got me addicted, it was being able to track everything through categories and reports and graphs. And the addition of features to subsequent versions of Quicken have only fed that addiction. It may sound crazy, but I like the fact that I can tell you exactly how much money I spent on Dining in all the years between 1997 and today (quite a bit…).

At first, living meagerly in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, it was pretty easy to track all my expenses. I didn’t have that many, so keeping track of my cash expenses wasn’t that hard either. However, as I started to move up in salary and expenses, so did the complexity of my finances. If I were a rational man, I would drop the need to keep finely detailed accounts of my expenses, but no, I still like to track my cash expenses as well as electronic ones.

And so, it requires almost daily upkeep to keep track of things, whether it be balancing the bank account or reconciling credit card statements. In actuality, the total time I spend on this stuff per month would probably not be terribly more than a normal person would spend if they just paid bills and balanced the checkbook once or twice a month. But it would still be more time, nonetheless.

The end result is that I always feel comfortable with my finances. Even if I know that I’ll be eating ramen until next month’s paycheck, I feel better knowing that than I would not knowing.

On Aug. 21, 2005, I merged my finances figuratively and literally with my lovely wife. Since then, I’ve been working almost daily to try to get her records entered and merged into my accounts, and getting back to the level of comfort with our finances that I had before.

It’s been hard for Bridget to understand. Her previous version of bookkeeping consisted of throwing her bills (sometimes unopened) into an accordion file and checking her balance on an ATM to make sure she didn’t bounce any checks. My desire to not only pore over these bills and statements and keep regular track of how our financial picture is on any give day is something she can’t comprehend.

To her credit, though, she recognized early on that it would be better for me and easier for her if I kept track of all our finances (calm down feminists: I give her regular updates…). However, she’s learning what that entails for me: entering in statements from before we got married so we can track spending trends; poring over her bills and scanning them into my computer for digital archiving. She admitted to me a couple of nights ago that it “weirds” her out a little bit, and I can understand why.

But what I explained to her, and what she understands (I think), is this: Bridget felt the need to unpack our apartment as soon as we moved in and continues to work tirelessly to get things organized and keep them that way. In the same way that she needs that level of “organizational comfort” at having merged our two lives together in Boston, so I need the “financial comfort” of being able to understand where our position monetarily. And just as she didn’t feel quite at ease until things had settled down in our apartment in terms of moving in, so it will be with me: I won’t ever feel quite at ease in our new life until I have our financial picture fully drawn for me to see and understand. I’m almost there, I promise…