How do you keep track of your checking/savings account transactions?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't keep track. I just always keep a 5k cushion in the account. I don't have that many things that I pay out of checking.

+1. I don't think I've ever balanced my accounts and I'm almost 50. I just keep a 5K cushion in the account. I might check once a month to see if there is anything unusual posting. Most of payments are automated, but I do write checks for a few things like giving at church, school items, cleaning company, etc.

I'm the pp Quicken user here. That would make me insane, not balancing. I keep a large cushion in my account too (in fact our short term emergency fund and checking is the same account, I just pretend it Quicken they're separate), and there is no way we'd have a sudden expense to drain the account unless it was fraudulent. I like to know that my calculations and the banks are the same. I would feel super uneasy just looking at it and it "seeming" right. I fully admit to being over cautious though.

NP here but the odds of the bank miscalculating the balance in your account are pretty small (absent a fraudulent transaction). Similar to the PP, I keep a cushion in my account and use the Mint app to review line item charges periodically to catch fraudulent charges...haven't had one yet.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Check online a few times a week

This.

[Anonymous]

I sit down and pay all of my bills on the first and the 15th of the month. After doing that, I know how much is supposed to be in the checking account until the next payday. I do check online every week just to make sure there aren't any strange charges.

[Anonymous]

I use quicken to track purchases but gave up on balancing my checking account. It takes too long and there are always discrepancies I can't find. I just make sure there is plenty of money there, enough I don't overdraw.

[Anonymous]

i use excel

[Anonymous]

I just gave up. It got to be too much once we started doing debit transactions.

[Anonymous]

For those who have overdrafted, do you have the money to keep a bit of a cushion in your account? I keep about $5K in there and just pretend it's not there. It's part of my liquid emergency savings. That way if something unexpected hits, I'm not paying any fees on bounced checks. A few years ago, my ex accidentally bounced a child support check to me, and it would have sucked to have had to pay fees on my own transactions. But since I had the cushion, no worries.

Understand that some might not have the cushion to spare, though.

[Anonymous]

we have two primary accounts, both checking. essentially I have a rough idea of in/out in my head, and bank texts me balances every morning, plus direct deposits and low-balance alerts.

one is where my (regular, every-two-weeks) paycheck is direct deposited. All of our recurring bills are auto-paid from this account. Very occasionally I might write a check or make a non-auto payment from this account (semiannually for car insurance, for example). I have a rough idea of where we are in the month vs what the balance should "look like."

the second account is where DH's (less regular in both timing and amounts) paychecks are deposited. This is our grocery and target and discretionary kind of spending comes from. Again, very occasionally there might be an actual check written, but it's rare. Again, I have a rough sense of about how much should be in the account at any given point.

probably every couple weeks I log on to the bank's website and scroll through transactions. Acct #1 above is easy b/c it's the exact same, very few, transactions every single month, often the exact same amounts too. So an error or fraud or something would show up like a sore thumb. Acct #2 is a little harder to spot (we went for 2-3 months one time with an iTunes fraud issue b/c they were very low dollar) but DH is totally on board with my need for him to occasionally validate what transactions he is doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't keep track. I just always keep a 5k cushion in the account. I don't have that many things that I pay out of checking.

+1. I don't think I've ever balanced my accounts and I'm almost 50. I just keep a 5K cushion in the account. I might check once a month to see if there is anything unusual posting. Most of payments are automated, but I do write checks for a few things like giving at church, school items, cleaning company, etc.

I'm the pp Quicken user here. That would make me insane, not balancing. I keep a large cushion in my account too (in fact our short term emergency fund and checking is the same account, I just pretend it Quicken they're separate), and there is no way we'd have a sudden expense to drain the account unless it was fraudulent. I like to know that my calculations and the banks are the same. I would feel super uneasy just looking at it and it "seeming" right. I fully admit to being over cautious though.

Before the internet, the "ledger" used to be the Gold standard for personal banking. Now days the funds are sent right away and eliminates the in-transit floats. It is rare that banks make math errors. I just view the online transactions page.

I use Visa for most purchases. It is convenient, earns rewards and provides buyer protection. I just vouch (eyeball) the store receipts against the visa statement and leave enough cushion in checking account for occasional checks that I write. At month end, I download the activities onto spreadsheet to use later for budget and cash forecasting. That's enough for me. If I had to maintain a "ledger", it would just kill it for me. It would be like work and I probably will not keep it up.

[Anonymous]

I write down the checks I write for the months in the ledger but do not balance it or even attempt to keep a running total. I only write 3-5 checks/month and three of them come out of a dedicated account solely for childcare/school costs so I know how much is in there at all times.


The checks I write from my personal account, when I go to pay my bills on the first of the month, I log onto my bank account, scan down the list to see if those checks have cleared or not yet and if not, I subtract them from my balance as I subtract out all the other bills I'm about to pay (I use a notebook to keep track of my bills each month). If they're taking forever to clear, I just keep doing that each month until they do. This way, I know the money is always sitting in there for the checks for whenever the person I wrote it to decides to deposit it.

All other expenses are paid with credit card so I don't need to keep track of daily amounts coming out of my bank account.