Pocket surprise

My Grandma used to tell us that when you put away your winter coat for the season, you should always slip a bit of money in the pocket.  That way, when you take it out the next year, you have a little surprise windfall!

Now of course, Grandma lived through the depression, so she stashed money away.  Case in point, we have my grandparents old bedroom set up in our guest room and years ago when I pulled up the really thick, old-school, plastic drawer liner, I found money there, too.  Not a "windfall" per se, but $5 under a couple pieces of drawer liner, several crisp singles under another.  It made me smile when I found it, not only because I could imagine her putting it there "for a rainy day," but because it made me think of the brand new $1 bills that used to arrive in Valentine and birthday cards she would send us.

Besides, just as Grandma pointed out with putting money in your coat pocket, it's a nice surprise.

Which leads me to two emails I got over the weekend.  They were from a bank that we used to have our accounts at before we refinanced our mortgage 2 years ago.  When we did, we moved all our accounts to that bank, because quite frankly the service at our old bank was lacking to say the least and it seemed like a good time to do it.  I remember that I dragged the process out over several months because it's such a pain changing everything over with bill-pay.   Anyway, the emails included links to check the year end balance of two different accounts at the old bank.

What?  We had four accounts with the bank: checking, savings and a savings account for each of the kids.   We had closed all of them.

Didn't we?

Having just got through a round of credit card fraud issues around Christmas (Ugh!!!), I was very suspicious.  I went to the bank website and of course couldn't log in, because I had no earthly idea what the login was.  So today I went to the bank branch we used to use and lo and behold, it seems we did not close Matt & Gracie's savings accounts two years ago.   For the life of me, I can't figure out why.  But since I can't remember what I did two days ago, it should come as no surprise that I don't know what I did two years ago.

I closed the accounts and walked out of the bank with two cashier checks for each of the kids.  And for me, I felt like my grandma reaching into the pocket of my coat and finding a $10 bill.