Missing In Action
As of today, I’m still missing $5,000 to $10,000 worth of money linked with manufactured spending (MS). I wrote about that issue in a recent post, and although I’m leaving on a this morning, there’s a black financial cloud hanging over my head as I get ready to depart. As a positive in the whole ordeal, in July/July I’ll have recovered from the loss because of some favorable money coming in from MS activities, most notably Discover, but still lost money is lost money, whether that’s $5 or $5,000.
After discovering the issue weeks ago, the first 48 hours was shocking and my body felt the stress. For those first few days after realizing what had happened, I’d go to bed right after work because the stress had such an effect on my body. I’m kind of shocked at how at ease over time I’ve become with losing this money. I normally freak out if I’ve misplaced a small fraction of that amount. After thinking about it more, I’ve come to some calm rationalizations. I’ve decided to continue the search, but know that if I don’t find they money, I’ll be ok.
The main reason for the positive outlook is that I’ve always tried to produce points at the lowest cost. Now that I understand MS better and have more varied techniques, I’m able to produce points at no or very little cost. Even if you include $10,000 worth of losses from this issue, I’m still accomplishing the goal. If my time was factored in, then I wouldn’t meet that goal, but generally I spare my time from the equation. I’m mainly concerned with the amount of money that I’m paying for points, not that can be allocated towards points.
Shell Shocked
March was a blur to me; there was just so much going on. I dabbled in some bank bonuses like the Discover $200 savings and BMO Harris personal and business checking bonuses. Together those bonuses took $16,000 out of my normal budget, so the amount of money I worked with to fund MS on a daily basis shrank. Those bank bonuses compliment my bottom line after all is said and done, but they did detract from my focus and routine. I also did more online debit (gift) card purchases, had varied liquidation runs, and a pretty massive lack of sleep. All together, the combination took a toll and I misplaced money somewhere.
A normal month of MS gift cards organized in a baseball card box
For the last few years, I have been keeping debit card purchase receipts, liquidation receipts, and cards separate from each other. I’d also staple the money order receipts to the back of the physical store liquidation receipts. Until this point it’s made sense to organize things that way. If I had a receipt issue, my receipts were all together and arranged by date. So it was simple finding the error. But since I don’t know precisely where the issue stems from, I can’t isolate the source.
When I initially discovered I had missing MS funds, I did a general check of my debit (gift) cards. Each of my gift cards is organized by liquidation date in a baseball card storage box. I took a stack of cards that were liquidated on the same day and check a few cards in each batch see if they had any money left on them. My missing funds were over $1,000 so I figured if the issue ended up being a pile of unused debit cards, having a series or group of 10-20 unused cards would be easy to find. Over the past several days, I’ve managed to go through all of March’s $350,000+ worth of debit card balances. Much of that volume was Simon online or in person purchases, but cards came from other sources and stores as well. In total, I checked over 700 cards online or via a call in phone number, and devoted hours each day to the search. Unfortunately, I found only 1 card with $79 remaining balance.
Conclusion
I’m happy that I was able to check a fully month’s worth of debit card balances last week. Since that search didn’t turn up much, after my trip to Europe I’ll start match the liquidation receipts with the associated debit card numbers. If there are any cards that are unaccounted for or receipts without used debit cards, then the puzzle piece may lie in the the missing debit cards. If nothing turns up there, then I’ll need to call in each money order to make sure they were deposited/paid. I realize that I could have not used a set of debit cards, lost them, misplaced money orders, or had a deposit issue with one of my MS linked banks. It’s all a pretty big pain to deal with but also a important learning experience for me. Hoping it all works out, but I’m not confident that it will at this point.