Anonymous wrote:I'm old enough to remember doing it twice a month with a calculator, my ledger, and a bank statement. Now that everything is online, I just log on and check my transaction history once a week to make sure there are no weird charges. I don't write down every debit card purchase. That would be insane.
We do. It's not hard. We just keep receipts, but them in a bowl in the dining room, and once a week sit down and enter them in a spreadsheet. Takes about 10 minutes. We are young (used computers as kids) but spent the beginning of our marriage in a very tight financial situation, and this helped us stay aware and disciplined. It is now habit, and we catch quite a few bank/merchant errors so we find it worth doing.