This week for WFMW (Works for Me Wednesday) hosted by none other than Rocks in My Dryer, I wanted to share not just a tip, but a cautionary note to my fellow bloggers.  Perhaps this is common knowledge, and you know already - I had no clue and think it’s worth sharing even if it is well known.

Today was a day of reckoning - I needed to pay bills and check the bank account to plan this month’s budget. Scary thought having to check the account so soon after the holidays, but I am always glad when I do. Today, yet again, I found extra charges in my account from businesses where I had legitimate purchases but then was charged again after the fact. This is something that happens with discomforting regularity - I would guess on average about once every other month. Had I not been monitoring our purchases so closely, I might have missed some of these. I try to check online every two to three days, and though it’s a pain sometimes to find the time to do this, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that you just have to make the time to do it.

Each and every time the bank is willing to work with me to dispute these charges and we end up being reimbursed, but I wonder how many times this has happened in the past when I was not as responsible/had less time to check and just how much money I’m out. These are businesses ranging from the doctor’s office, to the baggage carts at the airport to convenience stores and do not even necessarily include fraud (though sometimes I wonder). Sometimes it’s as though I am charged twice for a purchase and sometimes I fear some shop clerk has my card and is just testing the waters to see if I’m noticing so they can hit us up for more (that might be in more paranoid moments). We’ve been victims of identity theft to the tune of 1500 dollars once (of course at a most inconvenient time - right before a move across country…). Thankfully that charge was for car parts in Mexico and we were in Canada at the time - pretty easy to prove it wasn’t us.

The scariness that is identity theft aside, I can understand innocent mistakes happening on occasion - the frequency with which these mistakes are occurring is what is troublesome to me. And even more disturbing seems to be that for every mistaken transaction that occurs where money is actually withdrawn, there are two or three more where the store/business submits a charge that for whatever reason never actually posts to the account (because there was no such purchase or they can’t submit a receipt to the bank for this). This can happen on the same day we were there, or several days afterward and seemingly have nothing to do with any purchase on our part.

So I guess the moral is - check often and be very vocal about your concerns. We in our household rely heavily on our check cards and debit purchases, but clearly this might not be the best solution.