In the retirement thread, I’ve mentioned an easy way to track monthly “outflow” is to do monthly tally (cash + checks + autopays + Visa) when you reconcile/balance checkbook. It made me wonder how many people (older) still do that? Certainly I can now keep plenty of funds there to avoid risk of overdraft. But I still continue the tradition. When still working, sometimes a few months went by before I did catch-up.
I no longer balance my checkbook monthly. I do reconcile my credit card statements each month. So much of my checking account is autopay that I typically write one check a month. I look at my checking account balance every few days online instead, basically whenever I get an email about a big autopay (credit card, rent, etc.)
My daughter has her accounts all at Bank of America. They have an online tool that analyzes your monthly spending into categories (for the past 12 months). A great way to keep track of your spending with very little work. However, sometimes it puts things in the wrong buckets (which you can change by reclassifying that expense.)
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My husband still does. If it was me I probably wouldn’t, I would spend more time checking our account online throughout the month .
O can remember many stressful moments over the decades where he could not find an error!
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No, but I do get a download of my spending daily and monthly and check it for accuracy.
I think I’ve written one check this entire year.
Maybe I’m too young (which is funny, I’m nearly 50) for this thread. My mom and dad do still balance their checkbook monthly and write checks for all of their bills.
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Nope, most bills are autopay, others I pay with online banking. I write about 6 checks a year, usually to contractors.
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Nope! I can look at my checking account any time I want to see what’s what. Like others have said, most things are on autopay, and I don’t write many checks. I let the bank do the math for me.
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I review my (several) bank accounts every day. Same with my credit cards - much easier to catch errors/fraud and stop it quickly. Haven’t done a true bank balancing in about 20 years. But I know every penny that’s come in and gone out.
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I reconcile my checkbook every month, as does our secretary. We realize we are dinosaurs. And most of my stuff is on autopay, but that just makes it much easier. And the bonus is back in May I found I was $0.30 off. Did some digging and realized I wrote our real estate tax bill for $0.30 less than it was supposed to be. I had recorded the right amount in the register. I wrote the wrong amount on the check. Good thing I paid it very early, because it gave me time to drive down there and pay my $0.30. In my town if you don’t pay your bill, you get your name published online! It’s not that easy to find, but still… Oh how I would never hear the end of it from my coworkers if my name was on the delinquent tax list!
Edit: I do get instant notifications any time one of our credit cards is used, and also when something comes out of our main checking account, so I know if something is fraudulent pretty quickly
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I certainly can see why many would opt to not balance the “checkbook”.
In reality, when I do so my work there are few paper checks (this month only one, my son’s birthday check from February; switching lawn service payments to Venmo helped.). But there are many autopays, transfers etc. In retirement I actually do a check early in the month to make sure auto deposits happened (pension, “paycheck” form our investment accounts at Schwab).
Very many of our expenses are done by Visa, at the stores and online and autopay. When I had a concern a few weeks ago about possible scam (turned out ok), I set up Chase Visa account to send me an email every time there was a charge over $100, an autopay, or an international transactions. I’m filing the autopay confirmations in my “bills” email folder for a while just to have more record of it. (though I also do update a spreadsheet at the beginning of each year showing all the Netflix, APple etc payments).
Nope, haven’t in years.
However, we do online spot check our checkings account (and sometimes I’ll filter the transactions to see if example I paid the 6 month yard maintenance bill….since yard man doesn’t use autopay).
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Have not balanced for around 20 years. But, I do check the bank accounts a couple times a month and the charges on the credit cards. I have found fraud but not in several years. Except for the checking account ACH to Robin Hood found in about a week and reported it to the bank and they took care of it.
I use bill pay- that guarantees it gets there- they will rewrite and cancel the check for free.
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We still keep a paper register and enter all auto deposits/payments. It’s a habit! Yes, very few actual checks. I review it against the statement monthly since husband keeps an eye on the balance to make some financial decisions. And I have to correct his errors 
.
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Right - it’s the register that can be helpful, even if few checks. In retirement, it includes info about quarterly tax payments.
This overlaps other threads about elderly parents, but it was helpful that my mother had maintained her checkbook register when I helped in the last months with bills. Also helped as executor.
I do every month, down to the penny. I have everything in our personal account in Quicken. Business and organization accounts are in QuickBooks Pro.
Treasurers of two organizations I took over for very rarely, if ever, reconciled the accounts. In each case, they were caught and had overdraft fees that they conveniently managed not to tell anyone about (I found them when looking through the bank statements). For my road association with crazy neighbors, I’m sending out the bank statement and reconciliation summary every single month.
It’s really easy to do. I actually enjoy it, I’m weird.
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What’s a checkbook? 
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I do. Old habits die hard!
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One other thing for me. Until recently, H & I got paid once/month at the end of the month. So that’s when I go in and log our paychecks. Then I write out all the bills that are on autopay, pay/record any other online bills, and write any other weird random checks. (Real estate and personal property take 3 checks twice/year! They don’t do anything online.) All of the amounts are known by that date. I subtract that from our paychecks, and that’s what we would have to live on for the rest of the month. All of our grocery bills, meals out, etc. are on credit card (paid in full each month on autopay), so there isn’t much else that should come in at that point. But it is easy to see how much we are ahead each month, or behind per month.
The checking account statement usually comes out around the 20th, so most everything has cleared by then. It makes it pretty easy to balance. It also helps to see if dear nephew hasn’t cashed his graduation check after 3+ months…
Now I technically get paid 2xmonth, but I just write that second deposit in there and forget about it until the end of the month.
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I am an accountant, but have not balanced our checkbook in many years. I check my bank account online daily and my credit cards several times a month to make sure nothing is there that I don’t know about.
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Quicken makes balancing a checkbook very easy.
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H tries to do this still. He never succeeds:joy:
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