Crowdsourcing

I have a fond childhood memory: my mother used to sit down with her bank statement and balance her checkbook every month, chasing down wayward pennies and dimes with aplomb. For years I was a zealous checkbook balancer, the kind who would not rest until the missing nickel was accounted for. But then the world spun unforgivingly into the third millennium, and a balanced checkbook began to seem like a party line or a lashes-to-brow sweep of pale blue eyeshadow or an enthusiastic rendition of the Hustle: a relic of days gone by.

Last summer my bank started charging customers to mail out paper statements. And, okay, I can see why they want customers to go paperless. But since I stopped getting a paper statement, I have ended my monthly(-ish) (okay, maybe it was every month) (or every quarter) ritual of sitting down with the check register and the statement and making sure everything is shipshape.

Fifteen years ago, this would have been a recipe for disaster. But like everybody else, I find that my checking account is a quieter place than it used to be. Most things are automated; I might write a half-dozen checks per month.

Until just a few days ago I hadn't given up on the idea of balancing my checkbook. It's right there in my Remember The Milk list of overdue tasks. (We will gloss over the sad reality that it is overdue despite having been postponed 39 times. 39!) I am in the middle, though, of figuring out what needs smacking around now that the semester is ending, and I realized that I am not going to sit down with seven bank statements and bring the register up to date.

So I am asking: what do you do, O friends in the computer? Are you still a pen-and-paper checkbook balancer? Are you a hoper-for-the-best? Do you have some snazzy piece of software that makes it all painless?

I have a Mint account that keeps me up to date on most things. One strategy would be to create a repeating RTM task that prompts me to classify my checks in Mint. That would make the record-keeping part of things easy. In fact, I am having a minor attack of the vapors at the thought that I could classify charitable giving and childcare checks in Mint and then get MINT to tell me where the money went next tax season. Would that work?? Could this spell an end to the slow and painful hand calculations I've been doing every year for Schedule A?? (Also, am I ten years behind the times or only five?) 

But that's only part of what I need: I need some way to keep track of outstanding checks, so that next month when I go to pay the property taxes, I don't forget that I wrote the Boy Scouts a big check for summer activities that they haven't deposited yet. The County Collector frowns on that sort of forgetfulness, but I don't know how to use Mint to ward it off.

(How did I just write 500 words about something that I thought might be better as a tweet?)

Wrapping up here: how do you keep track of what's going on in your checking account these days?

Comments

[Paul]

YNAB is a very helpful tool. It has rules being budgeting which make sense and let's you give each dollar a job. I used to use a spreadsheet to make my budget (which works), but YNAB makes it very easy to understand where my money goes and give me an idea how much I can spend. Another thing like about it is the idea of saving for those rainy day events like car repairs or insurance, house maintenance, etc. so that when a issue arises you will be able to handle it without throwing your budget plan completely off. If you are a student I believe YNAB is even offered free. I am currently taking advantage of this, and I must say I really like the software which syncs with your smart phone where you can input your purchases. Definitely worth taking a look at. Cheers! Paul

[Lilian]

My hubby uses Mint, but it's an "after the fact" thing of checking what's going on/ accounting. But we do write very few checks, so we just make sure we have the money in the account for those (school payment, tithe & donations, things like those). We do have a monthly budget there, tough, and everything (checks, credit card charges, debit card purchases) either automatically goes to given categories or has to be manually assigned (let's say that in a trip to a dept. store I get groceries and stuff for the car -- I try to remember the amounts to split it). Anyway... that's how we do it. WE never balanced checkbooks anyway, we use online banking to keep track of stuff...

[el-e-e]

I feel like a dinosaur; each month we reconcile our statement (e-statement that we print out) with our paper check register, into which we write every payment or deposit by hand.

We also use Quicken but it's basically just a hard-drive backup of the checkbook. So it's doing the work twice, almost, and I'm sure we're not using all of Quicken's capabilities.

I'm interested to see some more comments but it's a little overwhelming to think of changing the entire system and giving up the paper!

[Angela]

Our bank allows us to assign categories and run reports on their site. That's pretty much all we do. We rarely, RARELY write checks and have overdraft protection connecting our checking and savings accounts so bounced checks aren't really an issue.

[electriclady]

I pay all my bills online, except for the rent--even my daughter's violin teacher. And 90% of what we spend other than bills (including charitable donations, groceries, cell phone bill) goes on the American Express--we use very little cash. So I use Quicken for my checkbook, and whenever I'm paying a batch of bills (twice a month, usually) I cross-check it with my bank statement online. I'm never more than 5 or 6 transactions behind. I have a Mint account but find I don't really use it anymore--it was good when we were in a super-tight budgeting mode but now that we're in a groove with our spending where we automatically have a sense of whether we've spent a lot or a little that month, it doesn't seem so necessary.

[Karen]

I get Quicken each year when I buy TurboTax for free, and I use it to keep track of all of our household money. I usually download transactions three or four times a week and I reconcile each time. This takes maybe 30 minutes of my time, but it does not require my full attention so I'm always doing 10 other things on the computer while this is happening.

I like having a software tool to keep track of my money. I haven't shopped around and I don't have any particular issues with Quicken. I use it to tally my charitable giving, my household employee pay, my childcare expenses etc. for tax season.