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It was only yesterday when I was $5,000 richer.

With the market in such volatility, it was a great time to invest since I was in it for the long term.  So, I made my 2008 contribution of $5,000 into the Roth IRA a couple weeks ago.  It was such an easy process because I have an ETrade savings account and an ETrade Roth IRA account so it was done a couple of clicks later.  A few weeks go by, I log into my ETrade account and noticed that my account balance went down $5,000!

I searched around, and realized that there was a new transfer payment of $5,000 from my online bank account to my Roth IRA.  After more searching, I realized what has happened.  ETrade increased my Roth IRA balance by $5,000 but did not decrease my online savings account when I made the transfer originally, and only made the adjustment yesterday.

Ahh!  I was lucky this time because there was no financial impact but what if I already planned to use that extra $5,000?  What if I already bought the flat screen TV purchase I spoke of yesterday on my credit card and prepared to pay for it with that $5,000?

Even though I was annoyed as a customer, I should first look at myself and see how I can help to make sure I don’t mistakenly allocate money that isn’t mine.

It doesn’t need much brain power to figure out that I was just careless in this case.  I should’ve known that my balance was inflated by $5,000 after I funded my ETrade Roth IRA contribution.  I was just happy to look at my account balance and wasn’t sensitive enough to see why it seemed inflated to being with.  If I purchased that TV, then it’s my fault because I carelessly thought I had money that I didn’t have.

In the above example, the cost is relatively small because we can always refund the TV.  If the same situation happened with $50,000, the cost and consequences could be much bigger.

Look, we are all careless at times.  We just need to pay attention to things that are more important like our finances.  I know I will from now on, so I don’t start off an article in the future with something like… “It was only yesterday when I was $50,000 richer”.