Lessons in Finance

Q: When is your money not your money?
A: When you put it in the bank.

Dick and I decided to buy a used car. The first one we were set to buy, they needed the money faster than we could get it. Our down payment was in our savings account, which is a three-day transfer to our checking account. By the time it cleared our checking account (plus with the paperwork for the bank loan we'd be taking out) ... they were in too much of a hurry (moving out of town).

OK, fine. So I put the money back in our savings account.

And of course, almost immediately found another one. OK, I thought, three days to move it. Well, as it turned out, there was an extra waiting period because I had just moved it to the savings account. Yikes! So it was like a week and a half just to get our chunk of savings out.

OK, fine. The buyer was patient.

Our loan ended up coming from a person rather than a bank. Deposited the check ... and the bank put a hold on it for seven business days. Seven!!! I'm sure it cleared the bank of the person who wrote the check long before that.

It took about a month, beginning to end, to get this car.



OK, that's not literally our car, but our car is a 2002 silver Prius, so it's pretty darn close. :)

Really tired of banks, though.