Just starting out

My mother-in-law-to-be called last night. She was wondering why we hadn’t deposited one of her friend’s checks.

We looked blankly at one another.
“What check?” we said.

It turned out that her friend sent us a small wedding gift and a nice $100 check in the envelope.

Gulp.

We had never seen an envelope, let alone a check.

Here is rare proof that sometimes being lazy can be to one’s advantage, because I hadn’t taken the big stack of boxes from early wedding gifts downstairs yet. I had just let them pile up where a dining room table should be.

After much digging and scrutinizing wads of gift wrap, we found it jammed between the cardboard folds on the end of a box.

Whew!

This discovery prompted a very exciting turn of events. Just last night we opened our first joint account! A joint savings/money market account at an online institution with a good rate of return (currently a guaranteed 3%). We seeded it with that (almost lost) check that was our first cash wedding gift.

There had been much discussion about registering for monetary gifts (we have a honeymoon registry in addition to traditional registries), but it was a bumpy ride with a variety of family member’s conflicting opinions. While views on this issue still rage, I know I’ll cherish the family silver as well as monetary gifts. I’m envisioning that day in the future when we turn the key to a place we own; we’ll feel the support of the families that gave us seed money to invest all those years ago.