Last week I wrote an embarrassing article about losing $626.15. This week I get to write a more embarrassing one: it turns out I didn’t lose it after all.
To recap: the other week, Augusta, my wife, found a $626.15 charge on our joint account from December last year. It was from a hotel in Melbourne. The thing is that she stayed in an Airbnb rather than a hotel. And she was sure she had separately seen the smaller Airbnb charge hit our account. Neither of us could explain it. Six months on, the money apparently gone and the trail cold, I wrote the whole thing up as a cautionary tale about nobody watching your money on your behalf. Interestingly it became, by some margin, the most-read thing I’ve ever put on the internet.
And then, the very afternoon it was busy going viral, I got a sheepish email from Augusta: “ahem… I have some interesting news for you.”
It turns out the $626.15 was completely legitimate. A slightly different final search turned up the merchant, and the merchant was the provider of the Airbnb. The “separate, smaller” charge she’d been so sure about was not a charge at all; it was actually a related item in her tax return.
So: there you have it. No scam, no loss, nothing missing. Just a legitimate charge for accommodation she actually stayed in. The most successful thing I’ve ever written, built on a mistake.
Now, I’ve been thinking about this. I could have left this; said nothing and not fessed up. Nobody outside our kitchen would ever have known. But I’m building a product whose whole reason for existing is that your money should be looked after honestly, so keeping quiet didn’t feel right.
And in any case there’s an aspect to this whole story now that reinforces the point of my original article.
I spent 800 words last week wishing for a tool that watches your money and flags the charges that don’t look right. The whole time, I had one. Her name is Augusta. She watched, she noticed, she flagged it, she cared enough to walk into my office about it. The watcher worked perfectly.
She just gave me a false positive.
Augusta is about as motivated and attentive a watcher as you could ask for, with a direct stake in the outcome, and she still raised the alarm on a charge that (it turns out) was perfectly fine.
But the more I think about it, the alarm itself wasn’t the problem. Augusta noticing was exactly right. What was missing was anywhere for her to go: a way for her to settle it at the time she spotted it, and a memory to keep the answer.
And that gap is what a tool like Lucie is meant to fill. It was an odd-looking charge: an unfamiliar merchant name, a fairly significant amount. That’s exactly the sort of thing Lucie might have raised at the time, not as a fraud alert but as a simple question: “This one looks a little unusual, do you recognise it?”
And I think that’s the difference that matters. Had Lucie asked back in December, Augusta might have been able to clarify it then. She might have recognised the amount as belonging to the Airbnb, and Lucie could have recorded the answer against the transaction, so the question was settled once and for good.
And having that record in place, of course, would have changed the rest of the story. When Augusta got that flicker of alarm six months later, instead of a week of guesswork, she could simply have asked “What’s this charge?” And been answered in seconds.
Which points to the broader conclusion in all this: it’s not just whether something should watch your money, but how you should be notified. The easy answer is a numbers game: more alerts or fewer. But I don’t think that’s the full story. The notification that would have helped here isn’t another alert on the pile, or one fewer; it’s a better one. One that opens a short conversation and then remembers the answer. Quality, not quantity. Ask once; settle it; be available again in six months.
None of that is automatic. It needs a solution built to do all that: something structured to watch, with the judgement to know when to speak and when to stay quiet, and a memory to hold what it’s been told. It’s what we’re building Lucie Money to do.
So the lesson in last week’s article stands, more or less. Something should be paying attention to our money, be able to settle questions and remember the answer; I just managed to prove that by getting the answer spectacularly wrong.
The $626.15 charge is still applied to our account, where it has always been, for the Airbnb Augusta definitely stayed in. She has been formally cleared of all wrongdoing. And I’ve learned to do a second search before writing 800 words.