Early retirement is wonderful. My time is my own. Weekdays, weekends, who cares? Sometimes I forget what day of the week it is. Or what day of the month. This can lead to money-management issues. I’ll share two of them here that happened in the same month.
A few weeks after I left employment I took a celebratory trip that lasted five weeks. I was mostly hiking and camping, so during that time I was in and out of communication with the outside world. Mostly out, not because I had no mobile service (though that was often the case), but because I shut out the outside world to immerse myself in by surroundings, the here and now.
Most of my bills are on auto-pay (mortgage and utilities). The credit cards are not, because I like that manually paying the bill forces me to look at what I’ve spent (and maybe catch fraudulent charges the card issuer missed).
Before I left on my trip, I made sure my checking account had enough money to cover a full month of bills. But … I was gone more than a month, including two bill-pay cycles for some of my bills. I realized this in the last days of the trip, logged into my banking account, and found it was overdrawn! For possibly the first time in my entire life, even though I have plenty of money.
I *also* had neglected to pay one of my credit cards on time. I’d used my REI card the day before the trip to buy some camping gear. I only use this card at REI, and I don’t shop there very often. I didn’t realize I’d shopped on pretty much the last day of the billing cycle, so the bill arrived in the mail and was due before I ever saw it.
Thus I had bank overdrawn fees and credit card late payment fees (and interest charges!) in the same week.
I’ve labeled this post “part one” of a series because I’m sure I’ll make more mistakes. I’ll share them when I do.
