Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

In these days of plastic cards being used in the place of good old-fashion currency, I suspect there is a lot of money disappearing without a trace.

For most of us, spending money is very easy, even if it's money that we don't possess. There are very few things on today's market that can't be purchased with a credit or debit card. And in the case of credit cards, there are many people who blow a lot more money than they can afford to part with, and I suspect a lot of them don't know where it's all going.

There is an obligation on all of us to keep track of what we spend and how we use our cards.

I received a reminder of that recently.

I have been packing a Visa card in my wallet for more than 20 years. As the commercials of the past have stated, it's all you really need. One habit I developed at

the very start was keeping all my Visa receipts, and checking them against the statements when the bills arrived. Everything is almost always in order, but there have been exceptions - actually three that I can recall catching in some 300 statements over the years.

There was one time when I was charged twice for an item, which cost about $90. On another occasion, There were a couple of transactions that I had no knowledge of. I quickly made the company aware of this, and their investigation revealed that someone had stolen my number and tried using it. Fortunately, it had only been done a couple of times. The company even sent me a copy of one of the receipts and the signature wasn't even close to mine. The other occurrence was recent. I was checking over my July statement, and learned that I had apparently stopped for gas twice the same day at the same station. The first charge was for $68 and change, and the other was $59 even. And unfortunately for me, it was the bigger bill that I had the documentation for.

"My car's a pig on gas," I told the fellow who came on the line when I called the card office to apprise them of the situation, "but there hasn't been a day when I've had to fill the tank twice."

In each of those three cases, the situation has been resolved to more or less my benefit, and with relatively little inconvenience. At the risk of sounding like I'm trying to blow my own horn, the issues were resolved because I took the time to check my documentation. I might average one problem with roughly every 100 bills, but I think that's frequent enough to make the effort worthwhile.

I go through the same procedure with my debit card slips every two weeks, which is how often I receive a pay cheque, and have never found a discrepancy that couldn't be resolved with a phone call.

I shudder to think what might have happened had I not developed that habit of checking my slips at bill time. True, I probably could have survived losing the

approximately $150 from the first and third of the afore-mentioned transactions, although how many of you would have cheerfully gone along with being ripped off for a sum like that? But the case of my credit card number being swiped could have added up to a lot of money had I not checked the figures and found the problem as fast as I did.

How many of you go to that kind of effort? I suspect a lot of you don't, and I hope the above paragraphs have demonstrated that you're only hurting yourself by not taking such precautions. It's all part of what is commonly known as good money management.

I have often thought that this is something that should be taught in the public school system. Fact is if more people understood the importance of effective money management, there would be fewer personal bankruptcies and private debts would be reduced as well. The average student would get more out of lessons on personal finances, and be able to put it to better use later in life, than they get from trying to puzzle out what the Periodic Table is all about.

But even without educating people, one would think the message is pretty clear.

We all need money to get through the day and year, and no matter how much of it each of us has, there's a certain obligation to keep track of how much we've got and how much is being spent.

Now it is true that some people are better at money management than others, just as some people are neater than others. I once worked with a guy who figured his finances were in order if he hadn't exceeded the spending limit on his Visa. I have only been close to my limit once, and that's when I unexpectedly had to pay the tab right away for the reception after I got married (we had been led to understand we were going to be billed). I'm such a Romeo, going off on my honeymoon with my Visa at its limit!

I like to think I'm pretty good at handling what little money I possess. But it shouldn't require talent to use common sense.

On the other hand, I've always expected (perhaps naively) that politicians would be able to use common sense, yet they are the ones who have been running up massive debts for years, which you and I eventually have to pay for .

I wonder how closely Stephen Harper checks his credit card statements.