You can never be too rich or too thin, they say, and I’ve never had reason to dispute that.
(Well, not much reason. “They” don’t want to get between me and the nearest McDonald’s whenever McRib returns to the menu, if you get my drift. Yes, I will have fries with my rapidly Supersizing rear end.)
So it only stands to reason that you can’t ever be too cheap, right?
Right. But modern technology doesn’t exactly make it easy.
I’m decidedly old-school when it comes to fiscal self-control. My rules are scientifically proven to work:
- No entering Target with an ATM card or without a shopping list that’s carved in stone. I refuse to go without heat for a month because I couldn’t resist the lure of a 32-pound box of Cheez-Its perched seductively beside that $1.98 bag of kitchen sponges I’d budgeted for.
- No using credit cards to buy gasoline or movie tickets, no matter how much more convenient it is. In the first case, I might go crazy and assume I could afford a full tank. In the second case, it’s bad enough I paid real money to see Saw IV. No way I’m paying late fees and finance charges on top of that.
Finally, most crucially, no paying bills online. Ever. Yes, yes, everyone says my life would be much easier if I did. Flusher, too, once I wasn’t having to buy stamps every two days because the price went up. Again.
But it’s not like high speed internet service grows on cheap trees, “everyone.” And computers don’t exactly plug themselves into the wall for free. And don’t even get me started on mouse pads. At some point during all this online bill paying, I’d need a new one. Ka-ching!
I think I’ve made my case.
Clearly my issues with this go way beyond the price of postage. (Especially since I bought up every available “Forever” stamp the day they went on sale last spring. People rolled their eyes, but just wait until I’m still paying 2007 prices to mail postcards from Dollywood in 2019. Then we’ll see who’s laughing at whom!)
No, it’s the potential loss of control that terrifies me way down in my cheapskate bones. It’s another scientifically proven rule: when paying bills is a gigantic pain in the Supersized rear, you don’t spend nearly as much money to begin with. There’s nothing like the anticipation of having to find a pen that works, sign each check in cursive and—shudder!—carry the decimal point over and over while balancing your checkbook to halt that impulse charge of Donny Osmond: The Complete Box Set in mid-transaction.
Meanwhile, let’s be honest here. Most online bill paying is done in the office, where the computers are superpowerful and the people working at them can pretend to be, well, working. But what sounds like an ideal system is actually a bullet train to Screwupsville. What happens, say, when someone who thinks he’s paying a bill to his poodle’s pedicurist hits the wrong key and mistakenly invests his employer heavily in Hog Futures? Suddenly he’s pushing a mail cart in the North Korea branch, and Fifi’s tootsies are blackballed in pet salons from Pyongyang to Kaesong. Even worse, he no longer knows where all his money is.
Who could live like that? Not Fifi. And certainly not me. It’s already unnerving enough having to play high-stakes poker each month just to pay my mortgage. Besides me at the table, there’s the U.S. Postal Service, which I’m wagering will get the envelope there in time. And the junior high school graduate I’m gambling on opening it correctly and properly crediting my account as “Paid.” You don’t just bet the house in this game. You bet the house.
What’s that, I should start playing online? Are you kidding? (Do I need to go over that new mouse pad thing again?) Only fools and Flat Earth Society groupies spit in the face of science. My old-school rules can survive any test.
