TO-WIT: BALANCING ACT
“No, that’s still not right,” she said with the confident impertinence of a secretary who has been with me way too long. Then she gave me that look. She’s the only human being extant who gets away with it, giving me that look. But after so many years as my loyal, devoted and highly capable secretary/friend/personal assistant/confidant/royal pain in the petootie, I dare do nothing that either aggravates her or leaves a scar. She knows way too much.
“Its your fault,” I explained, but she just rolled her eyes and walked out of my office. “I’ll come back when you’re feeling less cantankerous,” she shot back but we both knew she didn’t mean it. She’s never been able to avoid me that long.
There’s only one thing in the world that could possibly cause this kind of rift between us, and no, it isn’t sex. That’s never caused a rift. What it is is the same thing that’s been causing a rift between us for nigh on to thirty two years. We were preparing a first and final account of a simple estate, trying to get everything to balance.
If we could have worked it out to the penny, that would have been a nice thing. It would have also been a first thing. Truth is that in all of our years together, we have never, not once, not ever, got an estate to balance, including, yes, dear client, the one we did for you.
I wish I could tell you what the problem is, but I can’t. It should be really just a matter of taking the starting balance, subtracting the expenses, adding the income, and voila, we’re done. But in my practice its always been more like voila, we’re screwed.
For years its been my hunch that its that damned starting balance that throws everything off. Either that or its the income or the expenses or the addition or the subtraction. I’m pretty sure the problem lies in there somewhere.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking he’s in practice almost forty years now, figure ten estates a year, he’s probably done near four hundred estates for sure. Well, if that’s what you’re thinking, congratulations. Your math skills are already way better than mine.
Yet despite such admitted deficits, every estate I’ve ever handled has balanced to the penny, at least by the time I’m done with it. Assuming as I always have that my tribulations in the law aren’t all that different from the tribulations endured by many of my colleagues, I am going to share with you my balancing act secrets.
1. If you have more cash to distribute than you should, you can fix this by increasing your fee.
2. If you have less cash to distribute than you should, you can fix this by reducing the executor’s fee.
3. If the difference between the cash you have and the cash you should have differs by nine or any multiple thereof, your adding machine is on the fritz and not even God could straighten it out. Take a guess at the correct balance and work backwards from there.
4. If by careful application of the above techniques, the damned thing still doesn’t balance, hire an accountant. They won’t be able to fix it either, but they’re so easy to blame.
If you find any of these techniques useful, feel free to adopt them, eo instanter, as your own. I have no pride of authorship here, as they were all my secretary’s ideas anyway. It seems that when it comes to anything math related, I’m not nearly that clever by half, whatever that means.
© 2008, S. Sponte, Esq.