Keys, money and a challenge

Last week, during one of our daily conversations that tend to get sucked into a vortex of crazy, Andrea at So Over Debt and I were discussing quotes. She found this quote and issued a challenge. Here are both:

“I hate women because they always know where things are” James Thurber. Relate to finance…GO!

Andrea, challenge accepted.

My husband has a problem with his keys. The main problem is that he usually can’t find them. In college, he and one of his fraternity brothers decided that the only way to find lost keys is to take another set of keys and shake that set until the lost keys magically appear. They believed it was some sort of mating call that only keys responded to. Sadly, it worked more often than not and sadly, I believe that they were sober when they came up with this theory.

Although my husband will swear up and down about the 100% success rate of this method, there was one time where I distinctly remember this theory/method not working. I was at his house and we were getting ready to walk to class together.  Except we were held up because—wait for it—he couldn’t find his keys. He looked everywhere, tried shaking another housemate’s keys—nothing worked. So I, being of sound mind and body, walked upstairs and retrieved his keys from the coffee table in the upstairs living room. I brought them down to him, tossed them on his bed. He looked genuinely surprised that I had found them. His comment? “Oh, yeah. We were drinking last night and I must have left them upstairs. Guess I forgot.”

This is just one example in a thousand of me finding my husband’s keys. I will say, though, that since we put a basket on our foyer table, the amount of times he loses his keys has decreased exponentially (although the amount of times he’s washed his wallet has increased exponentially. I think I’m going to commission a scientific study for this one).  And it always makes him angry that I can find them, thus proving the quote above.  But I still haven’t proven how this relates to finance. I promise I’m getting there.

Another thing you need to know, and I believe I’ve expressed before, is that I am primarily responsible for paying all of our bills and keeping track of our daily finances. Although we’ve developed our budget together, I’m the enforcer. I’m the one responsible for making sure that we stay on track, our checkbook is balanced and that we don’t have to borrow from one category to pay for another. We also have an all cash budget.  To monitor this, I bought one of those multi-pocket folders that most people use for coupons and this is where we keep our cash. Each section is clearly marked with its category and the money for each category goes behind the appropriate label. Sounds easy, right? Not for my husband.

When he needs money for something, he consistently pulls money out of the wrong section. For instance, I’ll go to pull our grocery money and $50 will be missing. Why? Because the husband keeps taking gas money out of the grocery section. Then he gets mildly angry with me because I again have to walk him through the intricacies of labels and pockets. This is a man with a Master’s degree yet he can’t figure out something as simple as pockets? It’s frustrating and amusing at the same time. Yet he gets upset because I know where things go. It’s annoying to me to keep explaining something so simple that my 5 year old can understand it (I guess Denzel Washington was right. Talking to people like a 5 year old is effective). But as the responsible one, and the organized one, it’s my job to know where everything is. Even if it makes him angry.

To his credit, he at least remembers where the money is kept (which is more than I can say for the checkbook. He can’t keep track of that thing. So I’ve accosted it, along with my budget notebook. He is free to look at them whenever he wants but I can’t stand not being able to find them so I keep them in my desk). I try to enable his good habit by not moving the money to anywhere that is not on top of the microwave. I am a bit concerned for when our countertop microwave gets replaced with an over the stove microwave, and my husband’s ability to get used to a new location for our money.

Oh, well. I guess he can always shake a few quarters at the folder. That should work, right?