Pure Stupidity

This month I did something so stupid that I can hardly believe myself.

A little back story: I pay all of the household bills and do all of the money shuffling*. The first week or so of the month I usually sit down and pay/schedule payments for the household card, my card, car, set aside funds for electric/gas and water, do our self escrows and send an extra debt reduction payment. At this time I also review all of our bills that auto pay on the house card to make sure nothing crazy is happening.

So late last week I log onto our bank account just because. I'm totally shocked to see more than $1000 just hanging out in our checking, something I never let happen. I check the recent debits- all of the ING transfers look good, household card went through, but there is no payment to my personal card. By now it's past the 20th and this bill is due between the 12th and 15th each month.

I immediately log in to the card site to see if the bank maybe made an error (very wishful thinking). I swear I logged onto the credit card site and made the payment, but there's not electronic log of the payments. So for no good reason I just had a late payment hit my credit report. I called and immediately made the payment by phone and got them to cut the late fee in half. I tried to get them to cut all of it but it was not happening.

To make things extra fun, apparently my bank account doesn't have overdraft protection. I could swear we set this up with our savings accounts at the same bank. But that credit card payment and an auto savings feature hit on the same day, overdrawing my account. I actually thing this is a bit comical and have emailed our banker to look into it. She's pretty good at working things out so I'm hoping the fees will get waived.

*This is largely making sure money is in the right place to pay the right bills. We have a brick and mortar for 3/4 and pay a few other things with ING.