I have completely assigned all such headaches to the Man, who occasionally walks around clutching his hair (buzz cut, which makes it impressive) and groaning.

The groaning might have something to do with the time elapsing between digging into the piles of paper brought by the nice mail man. Or not.

(we have overdraft protection. But, as the Man will insist on pointing out, somehow we never use it. He calls that a budget. I call it dumb luck.)

Also, the potential embarrassment of a bounced check is a strong incentive not to let it happen. Overdraft protection removes that incentive.

Home insurance and auto insurance protect against acts of God and incidents where other people are at fault. You could live a perfect life, never making a mistake, and still have hour house burn down, or a tree fall on it, or a burglar break into it, or have a careless sideswipe your new car in Newton Corner the day after you drive it off the lot.

I have no one to blame but myself when my checking account goes negative. The right solution to the problem is not to let it happen in the first place, not to create an unnecessary safety net.

If I make it easy to be sloppy about my finances without suffering (much) for it then I will get sloppy about my finances. That’s just human nature. It’s likely that over time the interest I pay on overdrafts will exceed the overdraft fees. I refuse to start down that slippery slope.

Overdraft protection demolishes one of the strongest fences around sloppy financial management.

The interest payment is likely less than the cost of the bounced check fee that you wound up paying. And I repeat, if you never use the overdraft protection, it costs you absolutely nothing. If you had had it all along, you wouldn’t have paid anything at all until this recent event, you wouldn’t have been embarrassed in front of the recipients of those checks, and your so-called “idiot tax” would have been lower. What’s so bad about that?

1. It would be a concession that I can’t properly manage my finances. That’s not a concession that I’m willing to make. This is the first time I’ve bounced checks in twenty years. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.
2. With an overdraft line of credit, when the checking account balance goes positive again, the line of credit doesn’t get paid off automatically — the account holder has to pay it off by hand, and in the meantime, s/he gets charged interest. No thanks.

I keep enough in the checking account to cover the bills. The rest (when there is “rest” ) goes into higher yield accounts. When my paycheck direct deposit isn’t enough to cover current expenses, I either transfer from another account, or if there is currently no extra cash lying around in the other account, transfer from my home equity line.

When I let the paperwork slip for too long, then checks, cash withdrawals, and electronic payments accumulate that I haven’t put in the ledger, and if it’s a time of year when we’re cash-flow negative (which this time of year is, because of all the school and activity payments coming due), that means bounced checks.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. No excuse for it at all. Just stupid.

And I, for one, appreciate all the work you’ve put into J4O. As much as anyone else, you’re convincing me to support him more strongly than I might have otherwise.