When my banker learns I’ve written something on the topic of family finance, he will no doubt call the Library of Congress to have my work reclassified as fiction. This guy has the personality of a bug zapper. To tell you the truth, I’m a little miffed at him at the moment. I think it’s pretty tacky that some bankers send their customers discount interest incentives for new loans. And others give nice gifts for maintaining a minimum balance. My banker sends sympathy cards to my children.

I mean, the nerve of him to think I would overdraw my account on purpose just to aggravate his ulcer. I told him not to take it personally—that it’s usually due to a simple addition or subtraction error, an automatic draft I didn’t record, or the thirteen missing checks I forgot to enter in the checkbook.

But it still puzzles me how a person like me— who keeps impeccable records—could regularly be overdrawn. As soon as I write a check, I immediately grab a tube of lipstick or crayon and write down the approximate amount of the check on the back of a gum wrapper. And even if I do forget to record the amount of a check once in a while, I don’t worry about it because I keep a fifty-dollar buffer in the account to fool myself. This works well unless it’s the check for the mortgage I forget to record.

Actually, I have my own method of accounting to balance our checkbook. I drop the last digit, add my weight! (not the one on my physician’s chart, but the one on my driver’s license), multiply by the number of children under our roof at that moment, and divide by my shoe size. That’s close enough for me.

Actually, I have made some progress toward keeping our checkbook balanced. I hired an accountant. But that didn’t make figuring out our family budget any easier. Quite frankly, I think budgets are downright unbiblical. You probably already know this, but God did not create the budget. Nowhere in the Bible will you find God putting one of his prophets on a budget. No, God is a loving and generous God. The budget is a human idea.

But as much as I hate it, we need some sort of system to figure out how much money we don’t have every month. To tell you how much it costs to keep my family of five fed would only make you think I’m a few shrimp short of a cocktail. I hate those women’s magazines with articles about how to feed a family of six on ninety six dollars a month. You show me a woman who can do this, and I’ll show you a woman whose entire family is anorexic. The way my kids eat, ninety-six dollars gets me down the first aisle and halfway through the dairy case.

Since the cost of living seems to increase in our family by the hour, we’ve had to be creative about making extra money. One way we’ve increased our family income is buying houses, fixing them up, then selling them at a profit. We’ve moved seven times in the last twenty-two years.

The first stressproducing part of remodeling houses is applying for a loan. Few will argue that bankers consider those of us who fall into the dubious category of “self-employed” on the same level with lepers.

During one particular house-hunting venture, we began our search for a home loan at a local bank. The loan officer looked like Ken who had a wife at home named Barbie. He had perfect posture—so as not to wrinkle the back of his shirt—his nails were perfectly manicured, and he had a head of hair any televangelist would die for. But the hair on his neck was evidently not sprayed down, because it stood straight up when we mentioned we were self-employed. We didn’t stay long.

Finally we found a loan officer at a large bank who was willing to work with us. We breathed a sigh of relief when we started the loan application process.

It didn’t take long to figure out the word privacy had absolutely no meaning to this man. He wanted to know everything from our blood type and underwear size to how many times we brush our teeth each day. He called us every day for the next three weeks to ask more questions. I had to account for every penny I’d spent for the past three years. Trust me, this was no small task for a woman who uses her canceled checks for confetti on New Year’s Eve. Feeling a little put out, I suggested to Bill we just take off our clothes and stand in front of his desk. He knew every other detail of our lives— why not all?

In what was obviously a great act of faith on the banker’s part, he loaned us the money for the house we wanted to remodel. But you must understand that families like ours, who don’t have a lot of extra capital to invest, must live in their house and work on it at the same time. This can be interesting—to say the least. Think about it. Have you ever seen a picture of a woman shaving her legs with a paring knife over the kitchen sink because the bathroom’s torn up? Or how many photographs show an irate lady trying to track down the electrician who skipped the country after installing her ceiling fan with two speeds—off and hurricane?

After remodeling our last house, we lived in it for eleven years. This posed a definite problem for a woman who lives with four men who refuse to throw away their old toothbrushes.

“If we’re going to put our house on the market, we’ll have to clear a path so lookers can walk through,” I said with authority.

They did not respond. I knew I’d have to be ruthless.

“Okay, boys, let’s start with your things,” I said. “I think we can probably live without this headless GI Joe figure . . .”

“No way you’re throwing him away. He’s my favorite guy,” James countered.

“Fine. How about this stringless guitar? It’s just taking up space.”

“Don’t touch my guitar!” Joel pleaded. “In five years I’m going to start my own band.”

“Mom,” John begged. “When you run an ad for the house, just don’t include our room. That way, when we move out and the new people move in, they’ll think they got a bonus room with the deal.”

I want to insert here that I try—with God’s help--to be a woman who always tells the truth. I’ve taught my children that half-truths or not speaking up when asked a question to which they know the answer is the same as telling a lie. With every one of you as my witness, I confess that when my teenagers asked if I had seen their collection of 538 bottle caps, I said I gave them to a man who came to the door holding a gun and wearing pantyhose over his head. When James couldn’t find his treasure box filled with three years’ worth of expired toy coupons, a paper-clip necklace, fourteen empty fast-food containers, an empty jelly packet, and seven jelly-coated pennies, I told him I had no idea where it was. (Well, I didn’t have any idea which garbage dump it ended up in.) And to this day, when Bill asks me if I’ve seen his very favorite faded, stained, shabby, ragged, bedraggled, dilapidated work shorts, I quickly change the subject.

Once I cleaned out enough clutter so we could honestly advertise that the house had closets, it went on the market. For a woman whose kitchen is listed on Club Medfly’s most desirable list, keeping things public-ready is no party. We asked our real estate agent to put “Call before showing” in our ad, so at least we could hide the breakfast dishes in the clothes dryer before people walked through. We learned that most agents did call—from their car phones in front of our house. Good thing the house sold in three weeks because we couldn’t live life in fast-forward much longer without becoming the first family to suffer simultaneous coronaries. I’m telling you, when the phone rang we moved at the speed of light. We put dirty clothes under potted plants, threw wet towels in the deep freeze, and hid newspapers in the piano. When we moved, I found my checkbook in the waffle iron.

After signing away our valuables, any possible inheritance, and our children at the title company, we started loading up our belongings. We resembled the road crew from Ringling Brothers Circus. It took three days, but we finally got everything moved and we saved a lot of money by doing it ourselves.

Exhausted, we sat down in a circle of odd pieces of furniture and dedicated our house to God. We prayed that he would make it a home filled with love, joy, and good memories. I personally prayed that if any family members ever mentioned the idea of stretching our budget by remodeling and moving again, God would keep me from wringing their neck. So far, he’s answered that prayer.