6/23/2023 0 Comments Best checkbook ledger app![]() ![]() ![]() It’s definitely enough to motivate you to use cash - or at least stop using checks. It can be a long and arduous process for those who have a lot of transactions each month. If the errors belong to the bank, you must contact the bank to correct them. If you find errors on your part, such as transactions you forgot to write down or transposed numbers, you must correct them in your register. Then you have to account for all the stuff that hasn’t cleared yet - the stuff your bank doesn’t know about. You may even have to go back through your check register and redo the math if you screwed anything up. To balance it, you compare your register to your bank statement or online bank account, checking off any amounts you confirm. That way, you always know how much you can safely spend, even if a check hasn’t cleared your account yet. ![]() Then, you subtract the amount from the total to keep a running balance. To ensure you know exactly how much money you really have to spend at all timesĪs you make transactions, you list the dates, amounts, transaction or check numbers, and payees in your check register.To ensure there were no fraudulent transactions or vendor errors.To ensure neither the bank nor you (mainly you) made any entry or calculation errors.To understand why, it’s helpful to remind yourself what balancing a checkbook entails and why you do it.įor those in need of a refresher, balancing a checkbook is comparing the info you recorded in your check register to your bank statements to ensure they both say the same thing. You’re not out of checking in on your bank altogether, but actually balancing your checkbook is often wholly unnecessary if you use modern payment methods. If you “write checks” through your online bank account, you can most likely skip it too. Just bookmark this article for later when you finally kick the habit.īut if you’re being held hostage by late adopters and only have a checkbook to pay rent or just don’t use checks at all anymore, you can probably stop balancing. If you whip out that checkbook almost as frequently as most people use a debit card - at the supermarket to pay for groceries, your desk to pay the bills, your bank to get some cash - then you can stop reading. And “regularly” is the operative word there. It depends on your spending habits, preferences, and whether you still regularly write paper checks. I was going to tell you that of all the ways I’ve tried to track my money, balancing my account with a check register once per month was the best when it honestly wasn’t.īut those articles and my original angle for this article are wrong for a really big and continually growing group of people. I was prepared to argue that you should - even though I quit because it was giving me an ulcer. And I drank the Pepto Bismol-flavored Kool-Aid for a while. That’s what most of the articles that come up when you search for “do you need to balance your checkbook anymore” say. In the interest of full disclosure, when I pitched this article, I was going to make the misinformed and frankly disingenuous argument that everyone still needs to balance their checkbooks. What is the worst that could happen?ĭo You Still Need to Balance Your Checkbook? And no matter your generation, from Zoomer to Boomer, including that one oft-forgotten generation and the one people can’t stop blaming for killing things that sucked anyway, we all have to be asking ourselves one vital question: Do we really need to balance our checkbooks anymore? Like, honestly. Or maybe it was this one time in a high school blow-off class you kinda wish you hadn’t blown off called something like “life sciences” where the teacher (most likely a coach) taught you things about personal finance and laundry or something.Īt some point in your life, you’ve probably balanced a checkbook or seen someone do it. Maybe it was you in your dorm room at college. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |