ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

My heart is bleeding

I just found out this morning, as I was checking the balance on my flexible spending account that the claim I submitted this January wasn’t processed.  I called the claim office to find out why, and the reason was that there was no record of my claim.  Since it has already passed the claim deadline of April 15, 2009, I cannot claim the balance on my account from last year’s flexible spending account for my childcare expenditure in 2008.  I should have checked my account to ensure that the reimbursement was there.  I have been faxing the claims for years and never had the problem of a claim not being processed.  I have all the information I faxed except the fax transmission record.  Therefore, there is no proof for me to even argue that I did fax the claim in January 2009.

US $1,700 went down the drain.  All right, to be precise, it was roughly US $1,000, since it is pre-tax money.  Oh, well, the loss in stock market is even bigger.  Think of an all-stock portfolio that I keep.  Anyway, you can imagine how upset I was this morning.  Luckily, I have a supporting husband who doesn’t blame me for throwing all our money away.  At least there is something to cheer for when I was in a bad mood.  If you learnt that I once day-traded and lost US $20,000 within minutes, you will know what a good husband I get.  He never scolded me for that because he knew I learnt the lesson (though a very expensive one) and there was no use bitching about it.  He did take over the bill payment five years ago, since I kept forgetting to pay the bills on time and constantly got slammed with financial charges.  I still manage our household portfolio because trading is something that I enjoy.  Anyway, there is not much to do about it now with this economy.

You might wonder why an MBA like me, working in a financial industry would be so sloppy with my personal finance.  I think that it is because I have already spent too much time on finance at work.  This also reflects on other areas too.  I am very organized at work but extremely messy at home.  I am a complete opposite person when at work and when at home.  I guess that I have spent too much time at work maintaining a certain image that I cannot keep it on anymore at home. 

Anyway, for this financial mishap, I told my husband that we will have to forego dining out twice a week for the next 10 weeks to recoup what we lost.  Maybe, we will have to give up our vacation in San Diego this Christmas.  He doesn’t seem to be bothered by that, so I guess that there is still hope to go to San Diego.  Maybe cutting back on dining out would be enough.