I was in a car accident back in March and sustained a concussion in the left quadrant of my brain. That’s right … the left side. The side that controls logic, reasoning, ability to do math, and consequently, how you handle money.
I’ve always been the bill-payer in our family. I have a handy-dandy chart, I know when everything is due, and on payday, I sit down and pay all the bills. This has been my routine since I got married. Come rain, come shine … the bills are paid on payday.
And yet, for some reason, two months ago we started getting phone calls from our creditors. It seems I hadn’t been paying the bills, even though I had every memory of doing so. We pulled out our checkbook, and sure enough, those bills had not been paid. What’s more, my husband, who is a math genius, could not make heads or tails out of that checkbook, even after studying it for three hours.
Worst of all, I felt like an idiot. How did I forget to pay the bills? How did I get us into such a mess? I talked to my doctor about it, and he explained that such things are very common. It can take up to a year to recover from a concussion, and considering that mine was on the left side, it was perfectly natural that I would have difficulty with numbers, organization, remembering, and math. My husband is overseeing the finances for the time being.
So, if you have suffered a brain injury of any kind during the last year, you may want to ask your spouse to double-check your math and make sure that your spending and your accounting are correct. I certainly didn’t know I was messing up our money so badly … learn from my mistakes.
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