How Royalties Saved My Ass

I moved from San Diego, California to Tennessee just over a year ago. It was a great move because I pretty well despise California and my family could finally buy a house and not just tread water getting nowhere fast. Moving sucks, and moving across the country is even more challenging. So much goes into the move from renting a storage container for all your stuff, selling off what you cannot bring with, settling in to the new place, getting a job, changing the address on credit cards and whatnot.

Changing credit unions.

I changed my phone number and credit union soon after settling in. I could have held onto both, but I don't have too many friends holding onto that old number, so I figured my chances of getting a job would improve with a local number. I could have continued to use my credit union, but it was a local San Diego credit union without any local business fronts here in Tennessee. Once I had the new account I had to start transferring my money. It took a few months since I could only transfer so much at a time (it's not like I was loaded or anything, but I made decent money in California, at least it would be considered decent in many other states--in California I made a enough to merely survive).

I thought I had my bases covered, had changed payment options on things like PayPal and whatnot. I drained nearly all the money from my San Diego account, but never got around to closing it. With this stimulus payment going out I realized that since I owed California a ridiculous amount of taxes from 2019 (thanks, Cali, go rot in Hell!), I hadn't ever changed the bank account I have on file with the IRS (I haven't gotten a refund in years, so they've had the old account on file going way back). I suppose the last stimulus payment had gone into my San Diego account and had to be transferred over to my Tennessee account. I couldn't remember if it had. Let's face it, that was early 2020, which feels like ten years ago at this point.

Well, I couldn't log onto my old account, so I had to call. No stimulus payment in the account, however I'm told I have a negative balance. The operator says there have been a string of PayPal transactions. Oh shit! I asked him to find out if it is fraud. After a moment he says nope, it's coming from your PayPal account. Double oh shit!

I look into it, and sure enough, PayPal has a stupid method of doing things. I'd changed my credit union on file, but not my debit card. As it turns out money deposited into my PayPal is funneled into my bank on file, and money I spend using PayPal is withdrawn from my debit card. Sigh. So all this time I had my old debit card on file pulling PayPal monies from Ebay purchases, my son's video game purchases and who knows what else. All coming out of a bank account with very little money in it. How bad was this negative balance going to be, and why didn't the old credit union put a stop to the negative transactions. Seems like a red flag to me.

When I got home I was scared to even check my old bank account. I kept thinking that maybe the stimulus money had gone through only to pay back a portion of the massive negative balance I was going to discover.

My negative balance? $81 and some change. What!?

I go back through the last several months on my San Diego account. There's a lot of red with some green here and there. Green? What the hell? I look a little further. All of the deposits highlighted in green are from Amazon. I sit back and think. Why would Amazon be giving me money? Duh, idiot! I forgot to change the bank on file with my Amazon publishing account. Those are my royalties. I'll be damned, but those royalties over the past six months have been paying for all of my PayPal purchases, right up until the end of the year. Only the last two PayPal transactions weren't covered. My old credit union covered overdrafts at a fee of $32 per overdraft.

Had it not been for those royalty payments, I wonder just how far in the red with overdraft fees I would have been. I don't even want to think about it.

That, folks, is how royalties saved my ass.

Oh, yeah, and still no stimulus payment. Go figure.

If you want to help pay off that negative balance, you could always buy one of my books. Check out my Amazon page HERE. And if you'd rather not read one of my books, go check out that new Wesley Southard book Cruel Summer. It just came out from Death's Head Press.