Monday, October 29, 2007

I Lost Money

It is a normal Saturday for me. But it is very exciting one for my friend. Because he is going to buy a new computer. It is not for him though. It is for his sister. What a wonderful day it is! We are completely unaware that in an hour we are going to be in a big shock that we lost money drawn from the atm for the purchase.

Now you know that I lost some money. Oops! Did I say 'I lost some money'? Well it is true. I lost the money. Because we split the money and carried it in halves with us. And unfortunately the money that I was carrying was lost. Not all of them exactly. But it was a big mistake. Am I using so many 'I's in this paragraph? Well it was my fault. I admit that and take all the responsibility. It is not just words, but I paid for the lost money.

I believe that the core mistake is drawing the money to purchase. It is not like we should use the debit cards to pay all the bills. But the point is we should use it wherever we could. The reason would be very simple.

Money evolved from the simplest way of trade "Exchange". We exchanged pearls for spices, grain for gold and so on. Am I sound like a historian? Ok then leave all these history about the evolution of money. The deep moral I learned from this mistake is that we should keep the representation of money as simple as possible to give it more security.

Well let's see if it could be true. I will analyze one or two scenarios where this may stand true. Will you take Rs. 10000 in the denomination of 1 rupee coins? How about a crore? I thought about giving a scenario involving land to represent money. Of course no one could pick pocket it from us. But we are speaking about representations which are readily available for spending. Liquidity of assets like land are very low.

Wait a minute! I lost money because of carelessness. Now the chance of loosing something increases when the size decreases. I think it is not the way we keep the money matters. It is the amount of alertness employed for each type of money. Stealing a table from my house take more time than taking a 100Rs. note from my packet. So the rate at which I recheck if my possession if it is still with me should be higher than the probable time it may take some one (an expert in this field) to steal it.

Finally if we have a small object it will take little time to steal it and if we have a bigger object it will take much more time to steal it. If we keep money in smaller representation, we must check it very frequently.

I always carry my debit card. So I will have pretty much alert on it when taking it outside. But the money drawn from atm is a new thing, to which I didn't give much care than my card. Even I didn't put the money in my vault in which I keep my card. May be it would be much reasonable to say that keeping money in a form which we use often would attract more attention to it so that we won't loose it because of carelessness.

Anyway how to keep money safe is an never ending topic. One thing is very clear about this topic. There is no compromise for the alertness we must have to keep money safe.