We’ve been fooled so many times by the chicken-little stories we’ve all heard. 

We’ve heard that international terrorists are threatening local shopping malls near small towns and in big cities.  Terror has certainly been seen at shopping malls in medium-sized cities, but the culprits have most often been people down on their luck, who have apparently felt they had nothing left to lose.

There’s really no need to list every dire warning of doom and gloom that we’ve heard throughout our lives.  One of the worst has indeed been seen here in the United States.  No one who was alive and conscious of their surroundings 7 years ago will ever forget September 11.  There is just no need to list all the dire predictions we’ve heard before that day or since.

Now we are hearing about a mega-meltdown of our financial system, less than 2 weeks after being assured by some that the fundamentals of our economy are strong.  The American people are so shell-shocked since 2001, that many don’t believe the “financial meltdown” is real at all.

Here is one very ordinary anecdote that suggests to me that it is.

My spouse and I keep separate checking accounts.  We always have, for the entire 22 years we’ve been married.  We kept a third “house account” at a Savings & Loan for awhile, but we abandoned that plan some time ago.  That “bank” kept changing hands and changing names.  The rules for free checking kept changing and it was soon no longer called a Savings & Loan.  We thought maybe it was good that the institution was finally called a bank.

There was neither rhyme nor reason to how debits were made to that bill-paying account.  Since many of our bills came due around the same time each month, we started to rack up overdraft fees merely because of the order in which our checks were paid by the bank.  We were told that the debits were made in the order they were received from our creditors.

At first, the fees were waived because of the high-interest CD (Certificate of Deposit) that we had there from when it was a Savings & Loan.  That didn’t last long.  The bank managers were rude and insulting about how we managed our finances, so we closed the checking account and just continued to maintain our separate accounts at the different banks we’d used since before we were married.

We never bothered to calculate how much we ended up paying in overdraft fees before we closed the account.  Without a total, we certainly didn’t compare how much we paid in fees to what we had earned on the CD by the time we finally had the need to cash it.  I suspect it was the bank that came out ahead, not us.

Of course, this was in the 1980’s.  That’s when that large number of Savings & Loans failed.  It was reported that George H. W. Bush’s son, Neil, made out like a bandit and that John McCain was somehow involved.

We didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to those details.  We just started managing our household income as though we were single and we have ever since.

Now here is today’s anecdote:

I keep my so-called checking account (I only use a debit card now) at a large, international bank.  My spouse keeps the other checking account in a bank that’s named after the county in which we live, and monitors the account balance by telephone almost every day (sometimes more than once a day).  Since I do most of the bill-paying by direct debit, money is deposited to my account every payday.

It’s been taking longer and longer for the debit to show up when we check the balance at the local bank.  This time, it took a FULL WEEK!

My spouse blames my bank.  I don’t think my bank has anything to do with it, except that my bank did show the credit to my account within a day or two after we made the deposit from the other bank.  To quote Yogi Berra, “it’s like deja vu all over again!”

So, yes, I do believe that this financial crisis is real.  It’s not another chicken-little story.  I don’t believe it’s reason to panic.  I believe it’s time to be smart.

To panic about it would mean to be scared.  Being scared just lets the “bad guys” win. 

Our job, our Congress’ and Senate’s job, is to figure out who it is that is trying to make us panic and be scared for our financial futures, and steer clear of any plan they present to “save” us. 

If any of the financial snakes are running for office, we need to vote against them.