My net worth - Haaretz

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Thu., February 07, 2008 Adar1 1, 5768

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My net worth

By Avner Bernheimer

At the end of the fiscal year I found myself flooded with existential anxieties. Not on account of the passage of time or any deep soul-searching, but because of my tax consultant's request that I go to the bank and deposit sums I don't have in a keren hishtalmut (continuing education fund) and a pension fund, in order to ease my tax burden. After an entire year of completely ignoring the letters the bank sends me every week, I finally had to get in touch with it, at the last minute, three days before New Year's Eve, to prevent my money from going down the tax drain and helping to pay for the expansion of yet another settlement.

This encounter with my bank account always frightens me. It's like confronting a part of you that you are not sure is good or bad, a talent or a failure, a plus or a minus. I try to picture myself poring over the hundreds of pages of bank statements that are sent to me with the figures for the savings plan and the interest and the tax that was deducted, as if trying to decipher a code that indicates just how much I'm worth, and not in the monetary sense. I peruse the rows and columns, take in the pictures of children on the side of the page whose future the bank promises "to take care of personally," searching for myself as my heart pounds ever more loudly. How much I deposited, how much I withdrew, how much I saved, rich or poor, above average, below average, just average. I can't take it.

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My bank account and I have a sadomasochistic, master and slave-type relationship, only it's far from clear who plays which role. On the one hand, it's nothing without me: puffed up and arrogant if I excelled in deposits, a total loser if I keep it deprived. Who needs it anyway, sitting there like a parasite and leeching service charges from me? On the other hand, I find myself benefiting from the decent interest it sometimes yields, or enjoying the way I can make a withdrawal from it even when I'm certain it's completely empty. It's always there to prove to me that it has a lot more reserves and strength than I thought.

Over the years I've noticed that there is no connection between my feeling about the state of my bank account and its actual condition. When I'm sure it contains a lot of money, there's nothing there - and vice versa. I'll be certain that I have a serious overdraft, but will discover that I somehow managed to save. This pathological incongruity is a constant source of trouble. Certain that I've got plenty saved up in the account, I'll blow money when I actually don't have any. And on days when I sense that I've got nothing in the bank, though I actually do, I'll miss out on deposits and investments that could have brought me a nice dividend.

As 2007 came to a close, my usual anxiety from the yearly confrontation with my bank account was augmented by another big anxiety. With timing that could easily be the undoing of people who are much stronger than me, I was compelled (for good reasons, by the way) to undergo a series of comprehensive medical tests, whose results were also supposed to reach me, like all those pages of bank statements, on the eve of the new year. The mere thought that I would have to spend those same days going over dozens of printouts detailing both my physical condition and my economic condition was enough to do me in completely. And so I found myself lying in bed with something like a fever or just overall weakness, betting on the potential cause of death: complications of the flu, a stroke, a heart attack or a broken neck - the latter a result of my beloved husband's growing impatience with my condition.

I'm a little disappointed in myself for having gotten to this point again. I thought I'd put it behind me - this megalomaniacal perception of myself as one who needn't bother with the concerns of ordinary mortals, such as money and health. There was a time when I'd gotten over it, when I stopped swimming in a panic with my head out of the water in an ocean teeming with sharks, and plunged right in with them. When I looked danger in the eye, saw where it came from and dealt with it. And suddenly now, another regression. Bank account? Blood tests? What am I, a Kfar Shalem evacuee? An old geezer who lost his place in line at the clinic? I'm Avner Bernheimer, hatched like Aphrodite from a giant clam.

My friend Shira likens my aversion to reviewing the latest activity in my checking account and to reviewing my latest glucose levels to hearing a recording of yourself. It's a strange experience that forces you to listen to yourself in a way you never do otherwise: a whiny little peep here, a bit of impatience there, wisdom or authoritativeness you didn't know you had. There are parts of me to which I usually limit my access, even though experience has shown me that there's nothing more exciting - whether painful or pleasurable - than the experience of plunging right in.

In honor of the new year, I decided that I won't do this anymore. I'm checking my bank account, I'm analyzing the medical test results and I'm listening to myself. That way, I won't let anyone else determine my net worth.

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