Round Numbers
3 October 2007 by gildedbutterfly
I love round numbers. Really, really love them. Love that I opened my retirement accounts yesterday to find that my Roth IRA, spread among two index funds, came to a perfectly round number, with no pennies, nickels, or dimes. Got so excited that I had to proclaim myself a big nerd.
Yep, I love round numbers.
So much so that I’ve started rounding off numbers in my automatic emergency fund. $100 per month is put into the account via direct deposit, but once you add in interest ($1.16 last month), you end up with odd numbers. So, last month, I transferred money into the emergency fund so that it would end up equalling exactly $255 (essentially, I “rounded” the account up to the nearest $5).
But $255 still doesn’t look like a round number to me, so this month, I rounded up to the nearest $25, so my total (after monthly direct deposit, interest, and “rounding up” transfer) is now up to $375. Ahhh, much better.
And with that little bit of OCD out in the open, I’m going to straighten my desk. Again.
Haha! Want to come clean my kitchen? It would make you twitch it’s so bad right now.
I like your rounding–it will keep you on your toes!!
I like rounding too! Though perhaps not quite as much as you do.
I like for my accounts to be over certain round benchmarks: $100, $500, $1000, $10,000, etc. And I set my targets accordingly as well. Like if I only need $8,925 to fulfill some savings goal (3 months of expenses, 6 months mortgage payments, or whatever), then I’ll up my target to $10,000 just so its not set at such a horribly uneven number.
At least your OCD is upping your saving!
I have the exact same compulsion. I do it like this: I transfer the interest payments from my various sub-accounts into the big one, my Freedom Fund, and then top it off to the nearest $25 with money from checking.
It does cut both ways, though, because I’d rather spend a leftover $10 at the end of the pay period than put it into my savings and have it messing up my numbers.