I've set up many of our transactions to be automatic and most of the time after I set it up, I don't think too much about it. That's the whole point of setting up the automatic transactions, so that operations can be smooth and you can get extra income by doing nothing more after the initial set up.
Even after all this, recently, I messed up some transactions.
Property tax is paid via GIRO from my UOB One account as one of my 3 GIRO payments to get 2.43% interest. However, my property tax runs out every Nov and Dec, cos it's not a lot so the GIRO payment will drop out in Nov and Dec. I forgot about this and last Nov, I realized that the interest gained was only 1.6%. So I lost something like $30 due to this careless mistake. Quite upset about this. I've made other arrangements to make up for this, I took the GIRO from my wife's account for HDB parking and put it on my own UOB One account. My wife had 4 GIRO transactions and I just took over 1 of it. We're not fussy with who pays for anything cos it averages out anyway.
But never again should I make such a mistake.
So lost $30 over here.
More recently, I made another careless mistake. UOB One credit card requires $500 spend per month for 3 months in a row AND 5 transactions per month. I messed up and forgot about the 5 transactions for one of the months on my wife's card and so she didn't get the $50 rebate on her card for that quarter. It's quite a sad mistake, cos we use our UOB cards very often so I took it for granted that we would always have 5 transactions if we hit $500, it's quite rare to hit $500 spend with less than 5 transactions. Well on that month, we paid for hotel accommodation and it was over $400, then we had the M1 bill, the Starhub bill and the town council. What's even sadder is that the total amount was around $600.
She called UOB customer service to appeal, cos sometimes, they will be willing to average out the transactions across 3 months if they are nice. Somehow, the appeal didn't work. I've had them average out spending over 3 months in some special circumstances where I missed 1 month of $500. So I thought it was worth trying.
Loss on this incident $50.
My wife's POSB Everyday card is usually used to pay for the SP services bill for utilities. Recently, due to having difficulty with our minimum spend on our UOB card, I went down to SP services and swiped my UOB One card. This resulted in the POSB Everyday card NOT having a transaction for that month. DBS has the multiplier account. It's not a great account to earn interest in, but my wife has her salary credited into this account cos the company only pays to DBS banks, so we try to get some additional interest from the Multiplier account where we can. Due to the POSB card NOT having any transaction, the interest for the Multiplier account dropped. Cos it's one of the criteria to earn additional bonus interest. This was pretty careless cos I forgot that we previously intentionally changed the SP services recurring payment to her POSB card specifically for this purpose (it used to be on my card). We could have used her POSB card to make a small purchase and it would have sufficed to get the additional interest.
Loss on this mistake around $10.
The last one which I can think of is my wife forgot to redeem a $10 Giant voucher. Hey, it's still money right? It was sent to her email as a promo for buying some travel insurance. Somehow, she missed the email and it expired in April. She only found out recently in August, (don't ask me why she would look at Apr emails in Aug) and she felt really bad about it, she likened it to flushing money down the toilet. Cos the email was already sent to her and she failed to notice it, she said, it's like they already gave her the money and she just threw it away.
So another $10 lost here.
Total loss around $100.
For my wife's incident, I told her, ignorance is really bliss. She had already missed the email. And she never knew about it. Somehow she checked and found out. Within that few minutes, nothing in our lives really changed. Just that the knowledge that she didn't get the free $10 made her unhappy. She never expected the voucher from the insurer so there would probably have been no way for her to find out if she didn't go and check her old emails, it was not like she was waiting for it. The other incidents are more obvious cos we intentionally set up the operations to get the "free" money, it would be very apparent when we didn't get the money cos I check on it to make sure it comes in.
Do I feel bad about all the careless mistakes? Yes definitely, and so does my wife, this is all free money and is supposed to be easy to pick up. But due to carelessness, we dropped the money. I use the term dropped cos I consider the money already ours for the taking. It's not like I have to jump through hoops to get it. For all the incidents, we had already set up the operations for it, just that something was missed out. So we already consider it our money. My wife was pretty upset for her own carelessness. I told her not to dwell too much on it. What has happened has already happened, we can't do anything about the past. We win some we lose some. And we have to learn from our mistakes so that they don't happen again. Don't let the "payment" for the "lesson" go to waste.
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