I did something stupid. Yeah, quit nodding your head and laughing, it doesn’t happen all that much. 
I’ve been trying to set up FireFox and other programs on my own profile that my Beloved set up for me on his computer. You know I love my FF add-ons! Well, they had a new one for something called Buxfer. It’s a financial site that tracks all your finances. You can set up bill reminders, bill payments, balance your account, do budget stuff – all kinds of neat things and I recommend it to those who are interested. You can go to www.buxfer.com for the full site, and you can find the FF add-on here. It wasn’t setting it up that was stupid – it was not discussing it first with my husband.
See, here’s the thing: we keep all our financial stuff separate. It’s something we learned after going though our respective divorces. It wasn’t a “prepare for the worst” type of thing, it was a protection type of thing. Our past credit history was tied to our exes, and if anything either of our exes did messed up one of our credit histories, if we had anything in joint credit, it would mess it up for the other. Boy that came out confused! In a nutshell, if my ex got into financial trouble, since my credit past was tied to him, if Darc and I had joint credit on anything, something my ex might do could potentially affect Darc. Make better sense now? Keeping separate credit on everything is something I highly recommend to married couples. No joint financial stuff – not even the house. You can set up other legal documents in the event of death or divorce. If one of you loses your job, then your spouse is safe, and you may need the safer credit to help rebuild your life. It’s just a practical thing. And that’s a long way to explain that our finances are separate, but now you understand why. That being said, I’m the numbers person in the family, and while our financial stuff is separate, I do ALL the budgeting and bill paying. Essentially I run Darc’s finances.
So I set up his financial stuff on this Buxfer site and didn’t ask him first if he was okay with that. He’s not big on keeping financial data online, for obvious reasons. He was falling asleep and I didn’t want to bother him and frankly, since I’ve been doing all the financial stuff for over a decade now, I just didn’t think he’d have a problem with anything I did. And after the meltdown of my computer this week – my computer that contained ALL our financial – I figured keeping that kind of stuff in an online-accessible place was a good idea.
Well, Darc wasn’t happy with me, and told me so, in the nicest way possible you can tell somebody that you’re not happy with something they did. I apologized, and he understands my reasons for doing what I did. And I wouldn’t have even considered signing up on the site if they didn’t have a nice little delete button for those who change their minds about it. Keeping financial stuff online is a risky venture. Not keeping it online where you can get to it in the event of a computer failure is also a risky venture. It’s all about picking your poisons and knowing you’ll have to choke down one of them. In a perfect world, my bank would have a FireFox add-on I could use. In the meantime, we’re going to give Buxfer a try. If for any reason one or the other of us gets uncomfortable with it, it’ll be deleted pronto. Surely it can’t be any worse than when our bank got hacked into, right?
Right??
What did you say?