Budgetting hell

Well. Finally I broke down and did it. I made a budget. I actually used the Microsoft Excel that’s been taking up space on my computer for ages, made an amazingly detailed budget thingy with all sorts of space-age equations, and basically found out that we are financial retards. Our parents should never have let us leave home.

OK, actually, I already knew that I was bad with money. But managing to use more money than you have 10 out of the 12 months of the year is really bad.

Oh, and also weird stuff pops up. Lots of totally random things on our account statements. Like whatever FL was that we paid 30 kroner to by Dankort in August? Yeah, I filed that under “Diverse”. And if Pelle can come up with a good reason why we paid him twice for the øvelokale in December…

That done, the last step before actually calling Nicolai’s bank advisor in Næstved and getting her to put some order in the system was to make the netbanking work. Because we’ve been able to get in and look at how much money we don’t have, but actually doing anything with it has been above and beyond what Firefox felt it could offer us as users.

I think I spent at least one full hour on the phone with the nice gentlemen at Danske Bank Customer Service. Which, totally mind-blowingly disbelief-inducingly amazingly enough, is open on Sundays. But after getting me to try different things, they settled for telling me to download the new version of Safari (2.0) because the old Safari isn’t cool enough for Danske Netbank. So I tried that, only to find that Safari 2.0 doesn’t think you exist if you don’t have Mac OS 10.4 (don’t get me started on all those cat names). Right, well, I have 10.3.9 and am not planning on upgrading with the computer that I have now. The guys at Customer Service hereby recommended that I call back during the week and talk to their “Mac ekspert”.

So I called Wednesday and ended up talking to Rasmus. Rasmus put a lot of time and effort into getting my netbank working, can I tell you. Apparently, it’s a Java problem. You really need Java 1.5 if you’re going to use their system with a Mac, but you can only get 1.5 if you have 10.4, which we’ve heard before, right? So he tried to get me to download Opera and see if that worked. It didn’t, so I had to call him back and insult some girl by insisting that I get to talk to Rasmus again. So he had to call me back. Amazingly, there was a solution!!!

Yes, I am now the proud operator of some totally random university-project-browser from Japan that I’d never heard of before. It’s cute, though. I actually like it. It’s got tabbed browsing, and the buttons are cute candy colors, which basically is all I want in a browser besides that it actually really does allow me to transfer money between accounts in Danske Netbank. Yea! We love Japanese people.

So now we’ve talked with Louise down in Næstved and we’re going to get a budget account and a food account and it’s going to be very exciting.