A combination of time and my go to coping mechanism of humour means I can now make bad jokes about it, but I can tell you at the time I was rocking in the corner.
Lemme take you back to December 2017...
They say buying a house is one of the most stressful life events and I can 100% confirm this.
We had been looking at houses on and off in our preferred high school catchment. Our record was 13 houses in one day, expertly scheduled by MapGuy. We were having a weekend off looking while we did some Christmassy things and checked out Santa's Enchanted Wardrobe. Spoiler: it was Narnia and it was awesome. While we waited for the kids to finish the last of their play, MapGuy was checking his phone and saw a house in the suburb we were eyeing off was having its first home open... if we left now, with a 25 minute drive, we could get there five minutes before it closed.
Lock and load, baby, let's do it.
We got there and raced in. We liked what we saw. It ticked a lot of boxes. Great, quiet street. Close to public transport. A bit of yard. Four bedrooms. Modern (after renovating we didn't want to do it again!). It was 1.5km from the primary school and 1km from the high school we wanted the kids to go to. It was small and didn't have a pool - tick, tick and tick. We don't like giant houses where you might not see each other for days, and we didn't want a pool because of the hassle and expense, but, you know, feel free to invite me to yours.
A few days later after double checking finance we put an offer in and the agent was pretty dismissive of it, thinking it too low (well duh, it's her job to get them the highest price) but rang back that night to say it had been accepted. That was twelve months ago this week.
It was time to get the finance locked down. This is where shit gets cray. Try to keep up.
My parents had sold us our previous house (they had built it in the 1970s and I grew up in it - you should click this for super cute pictures of Bubba Glow) and our loan was through them. We had about $100k left owing to them. They had just sold their investment property and their home was on the market getting ready for their new house that they'd move to in the new year. So they had a chunk of cash sitting in the bank and my Dad offered to loan us $50k to put a deposit on the house, go toward all the fees, and to get us over the line with the bank loan that wouldn't quite cover the cost of this house we wanted. He'd be repaid the full original loan plus the new loan on the sale of our house, which was expected to be (and was) in early Feb.
With me?
So I told my Dad our bank details and he set about transferring a head spinning FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS to us for this super short term loan.
The transfer should have been pretty quick, but the money wasn't showing up no matter how many times I refreshed.
So we double checked the account number.
You guessed it.
I told him the wrong number.
I was out by one digit.
I can honestly say I have never felt such terror.
My mind started to spin, the room grew dark and I fought off fainting. I could feel my body flush with adrenaline. I retched over and over, standing in my kitchen with my Dad as he too was processing that he'd possibly just transferred a shit tonne of money to a stranger.
I fell to the floor and struggled for air. It was all very dramatic and if I'd started beating my chest no one would have been surprised.
Tricky and Bobbin, had come running on hearing the commotion, and asked what was wrong.
I tried so hard to hold it together.
"I've just lost some of Pop's money so I'm a bit upset."
Bobbin ran off somewhere and Tricky rubbed my back reassuringly and said as many comforting things as he could think of as I sat on the ground with a few tears down my running down my cheeks.
Bobbin came back and handed me the 20c she had gotten earlier in the week.
"Here, Mum, you can have this."
Yep. All the ugly crying you can imagine. I cried so loud I scared them.
My Dad was holding it together, saying it would be OK, but I could see from the tension in his jaw that he was pissed. And rightly so.
It was past 5pm so I couldn't contact the bank. Even the emergency numbers couldn't help me at all. I texted my bestie and let her know what happened, needing to share the burden with someone. She rang me back immediately (possibly our second ever phone conversation since we are text peeps) and all I could do was sob in to her ear. She spoke quickly but calmly, saying that she was going to put her husband on as he's an accountant.
He reassured me the likelihood of the number being an actual account was super low. He told me all the times that people write down the wrong number on a form, or key it in wrong, and it bounces back after a day or two. Even with garbled replies between sobs, he kept repeating how it was so extremely unlikely that it would go through. And it is unlikely. I'm told the way accounts are set up they generally don't have consecutive numbers, so getting the final digit wrong by one like I did, should be cool in most cases.
There was much crying and wailing over how stupid I was, but this is already going to be a huge story so I'll fast forward to the next morning.
At 5am I rang my east coast Bank #1 to find out what I could do from this end. I needed to know if it was a real account or if the money would ping back like it does 99% of the time. For privacy reasons they couldn't tell me anything and much to their credit they listened to me cry about it. On hearing how much money it involved the person on the phone asked me to tell her the number that had been entered accidentally. She typed it in and I'll never forget what she said:
"Privacy laws prevent me from telling you if this is an account... but I'd get Bank #2 to stop payment IMMEDIATELY if I were you."
Cue breakdown in 3, 2, 1...
I rang Bank #2 (my Dad had been doing the same thing over at his place) to be informed that that I couldn't speak to anyone in the Accidental Idiotic Internet Transfers Department because they had closed for the Christmas break, but would I like them to call me back on the 6th of January?
The most awful noise I've ever heard escaped my lips and I started to violently shake again. The person on the phone tried to reassure me that it was illegal to spend money accidentally put in an account to which I strangled out between sobs "that.... never.... stopped..... anyone..... beforreeeeeeeeee" at which point I successfully became his weirdest phone client ever.
All I could think was that someone would get a nice $50k bonus in their bank account, withdraw it all, spend up big and we'd spend years trying to get it back and end up with a random $2 a week pay back scheme set up by the court.
Every person I spoke to was genuinely trying to help, but no one could. One even called me back later just to check on me. Which OF COURSE meant I cried some more.
At the same time that this was happening, our loan had not yet been approved because most of the staff at Bank #3 (there are four banks in this story) had gone on leave already and it hadn't even been marked as received yet. The days were ticking away and the day to have finance sorted by was zooming toward us. We had an emergency meeting with our broker who advised us to put in a brand new application with Bank #4 because it was obvious that Bank #3 just didn't give a shit at this time of year.
Thank fuck for that because Bank #4 got on it right away and we had pre-approval in hours and full approval in a day... but without that $50k, we wouldn't be able to do anything.
Insanely, my Dad had another $50k in the bank (if you remember from up the top he'd just sold his house and wasn't buying the new one until Feb, so he had a super healthy bank account for a while there) and said he'd transfer it over.
At this point Bank #2 called me and said "the money has gone in!!". Is that not the best customer service? He'd been monitoring the account, probably out of morbid curiosity. At which point I had to explain it was a different $50k and he no doubt went away mumbling about rich people problems.
Because who has $100,000 that they can just transfer around willy nilly? Usually we don't, it was just this random set of circumstances that meant we did.
I spent my birthday in a pit of despair. I was helping ticket sales for a school function and even pay pass transactions made me nervous. If there was a way for it to go wrong, I'd find it! I would over charge people. Or refund people that weren't meant to be. You name it, if it was bad, I was thinking it.
I was responsible for losing more money than I had ever contemplated. And it wasn't even my money to lose. I'd lost my Dad's money. I forced myself to put on a brave face for the most part, and threw myself in to advent activities for the kids.
The next week I had to transfer money to a friend and I had a genuine trauma reaction when putting the numbers in. Nauseated and trembling I quadruple checked, then quadruple checked again, sweating bullets as I hit transfer on a piddly $20. Thankfully this reaction hasn't continued.
Christmas day came and went, and whilst I do think I faked it well, it was always the first thought I had every morning; the last thought every night; and at least half my waking thoughts each day. It consumed me.
Finally, in the second week of January, when were packing up the old house getting ready to move in a few weeks time, I got the call I'd been waiting for. My Dad informed me the money was back in his account.
If you take anything away from this, I want it to be that you should not try to buy a house at Christmas time; always check the account number at least fourteen times before you give it to someone or hit transfer; and to never, ever, under any circumstances, lend me money.
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