Financially literate people balance a ‘checkbook’ in 2019. Would it help if it was called a ledger?
If you use ebilling, auto pay a mortgage, electronically pay your credit cards, auto debit things like utilities - then those funds are coming out of SOME kind of account. Almost certainly, that’s a checking account since federal regulations stipulate how many non-inperson or none ATM (which requires a person) withdrawals can be made from a savings account per month. Not that that matters since it is prudent to also ‘balance’ a savings account.
At the end of the month one ‘balances’ the goes into’s and the goes out ofs. Banks make errors, humans make errors, electrons make errors. One balances in order to verify. It has nothing to do with a ‘budget’.
Financially literate people also line item check their credit card bills.
Our school has all juniors take Financial Lit. I don’t know what all was covered, but I do know it put some fear of student loans in DD’19 that was useful when she would get starry-eyed over some expensive college.
I’m an accountant and a bargain shopper. DD’s have learned some things along the way and I will continue to advise them as new milestones and situations come. BTW DD’17 keeps track of her checking account on a running basis by comparing online account to check register. She has few enough transactions that it often just matches with nothing outstanding. I balance mine every month with the bank statement, to the penny. And I still write a lot of actual checks despite it “being 2019” LOL.
Some people take “balancing a checkbook” to mean reconciling outstanding checks and other transactions that have not yet been posted to the account in when the monthly bank statement was mailed (which may have been a few days before receipt).
Today, people write far fewer checks that could be delayed showing up as debits in the account, and can check the account balance and posted transactions any time they want, so the act of verifying that one’s account has the correct credits and debits is easier and quicker to do, without a lot of unposted pending transactions to reconcile (the act of “balancing a checkbook”).
I have used Quicken since it became available for my platform. Everything goes into a master register. That’s what get’s balanced. It just so happens most of the entries run thru my checking account. So, even though I don’t write a check for the mortgage, utilities, credit cards or paypal charges…I still balance my ‘checkbook’ since that’s what keeps track of all the ins and outs of the checking account.
@ucbalumnus The meaning of words change. I know as I’ve been told at times I’m not ‘woke’ while actually I am quite awake because I woke several hours ago.