Keeping accounts

I learned to keep basic household accounts by watching my mother. She used old fashioned financial registers, a new one each year, and filled in income and expenses in her neat little hand. She never rounded figures up or down, and on any given day she knew where every penny that passed through her hands went. I think she probably knew where every penny that passed through my father's hands went, too; I suspect that my father, on the other hand, had only a general idea of our overall financial situation. He would have been lost financially, confused and at sea, had she been the first to die. My father handed over his paycheck twice a month, and my mother stretched his policeman's salary, later augmented by her receptionist's salary, to send two children to college without student loans while always making sure we could afford those summers along the way.

My mother taught me two things. Always pay yourself first - if you can't afford to save something every month you need to search and search for the expendable luxury until you can save something every month. "Something" being in the neighborhood of ten percent of your monthly income. She also taught me to keep meticulous accounts. Over the past two years I have become rather more general in this regard. I know what R earns, I know what we spend, I have a good idea of where we spend it but not exactly. I have a good idea what kind of vacation we can afford to take this year and I'm confident we'll be worth more on paper at the end of the year than we're worth right now. But it's all a bit...general. Had my mother chosen burial over cremation, she'd be spinning in her grave.

Because I grew up watching my mother entering figures into those register books, I'm partial to them myself. I discovered at Thanksgiving that my brother uses them too. Over the years I have tried computer programs to keep budgets, but I'm most comfortable the old fashioned way. A register book, with a page for each budget item in the front and a page for each month in the back. Entries made by hand, with a sharp mechanical pencil. Last night R and I tweaked did major surgery on our budget and I wrote out each budget item at the top of a page of a fresh accounts book. Here are some things I never thought I'd be factoring into an annual budget:

frozen embryo storage
public library annual fee
television and radio reception fees
documents and bureaucracy

Frozen embryo storage. Well, what young adult learning about annual budgeting and recurring expenses ever thinks they'll be writing that in their budget books?

The public library fee - 50 Swiss Francs per year if you live in Big City, 80 if you live in a surrounding suburb - really steams me every time I pay it. I thought the point of a public library system was to make reading and educational opportunities generally available, particularly for those families least able to purchase these items themselves.

The television and radio fees we pay quarterly. If you own a television or radio, you owe these fees. I had friends who, before leaving Switzerland, sold their television at the beginning of the quarter so that they didn't have to pay this fee. An agent tracked them down to verify that they had, in fact, sold their television. Then he asked if they owned a car. Yes, they said, we do. Well, he replied, if you own a car you own a radio; here's your bill. Now in all fairness I watch the evening news every night without a single commercial interuption; a movie will be interupted once for about five minutes of ads half way through. Skiing is shown live and they show all the skiers, not just the winners; they might break for a commerical during the pause after the 15th skier, but not always. When we actually get an American show like Desperate Housewives or 24 they show the whole thing without a commerical break. On the other hand, Swiss-produced TV programs (entertainment division) is, um, er, bad. Really really bad.

Documents and bureaucracy. Between the three of us we have four passports, two national identity cards, one Niederlassungsbewilligung, one Aufenthaltsbewilligung, a Familienbuchlein, and a partridge in a pear tree. At some point this year surely one of those things will need to be renewed or amended or altered or addendumed. Surely.

On and on I went last night, labeling pages, entering numbers in my Haushaltsbuch in a neat little hand, finding this small and strange patch of common ground with my mother. All those neat columns, all those tidy rows. There was very little about my mother, about our relationship, that was neat and tidy, and I'll take what nostalgia I can find where I can find it.

Income. Outlay. Balance.