Blog
The $5 IOU nobody remembers
Somewhere out there, my old roommate Josh still owes me five dollars for a burrito from 2019. I don’t want it. I’m not going to ask for it. I just think about it sometimes, which is ridiculous, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.
Small debts are strange. They’re too little to mention and somehow too big to forget completely. If a friend owes you $500, there’s at least a conversation to be had. If a friend owes you $5, bringing it up feels insane. Who chases someone down for the price of a burrito? So you let it go. And then they forget it, because of course they do. It’s $5.
The problem is that it’s rarely just one $5. It’s the coffee they grabbed on your card because their phone died. It’s the movie ticket you covered because the line at the kiosk was long and they said “I’ll Venmo you.” Each one is nothing. Stacked up over a year, it might be $60 or $80, and more importantly, it starts to feel like a pattern.
I don’t think the money is really the point. Most of us could lose $80 over a year without noticing, financially speaking. What we notice is the imbalance. If you’re always the one who covers the small stuff, and the other person never seems to register it, you start to feel a little bit like a vending machine. Not mad, exactly. Just a little invisible.
There’s a version of this that’s actually kind of sweet, too. My friend Tess and I have been trading lunches for about six years. She covers one and I cover the next. Neither of us has ever tried to figure out who’s ahead. That works because it really is mutual, and we both know it. The trouble only starts when the trading runs in one direction for long enough that somebody stops thinking of it as trading.
And on the flip side, I’ve definitely been Josh. I’m sure there are people out there who quietly remember that I owe them $7 for a beer at a bar trivia night years ago. I wasn’t being a jerk. I just genuinely didn’t think about it again, because it was too small to stick. That’s the thing about tiny debts. The person who owes almost never remembers. The person who’s owed almost always does.
What I try to do now
The easiest fix, by far, is just paying it back immediately. If a friend covers my coffee, I send the $5 before we’ve finished drinking it. It takes about ten seconds, and it means neither of us has to carry it around. I started doing this with bigger stuff earlier this year as part of a small-habits kick, and it turns out it works even better for tiny amounts, because tiny amounts are the ones that slip away.
The other option, honestly, is to just say out loud that it’s on you. “I got this one” is a magic phrase. It turns a tiny loan into a tiny gift, and then nobody has to think about it again. The only thing that doesn’t work is the silent middle ground, where you technically expect it back but never say so. That’s where the vending-machine feeling grows.
If you’re someone who really can’t let the small stuff go (no judgment, I clearly can’t either), writing it down helps more than you’d think. It feels silly to log a $4 coffee anywhere. But something like OweMate handles a $4 coffee as easily as a $400 loan, and the point isn’t really the $4 anyway. The point is getting it out of your head so it stops taking up space in there.
Every so often I think about texting Josh. Not to ask for the money, just to tell him I still remember the burrito. I think he’d find it funny. I think he’d also probably send me $5, and then I’d have nothing left to think about, which honestly might be worse.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.