No. We use debit cards (from our checking account) for almost all purchases, even minor ones, so keeping our own records would take a huge amount of time. We check our balance online a couple of times a week and mentally track any outstanding checks. If our checking account gets low, we transfer some buffer money from savings until pay day.
I don’t have a checkbook (in Spain you can ask for one, linked to your “current account”, but it’s not a different kind of account and it’s unusual to use checks). I do check that what’s listed in the accounts’ statements matches what I’m expecting. I keep my bankers in Spain appraised of where I expect to be, so that for example now they know that a charge from Sweden would be suspect but one from the UK is not, as they know I’m in Scotland.
I rarely write checks, but have PayPal that takes $$ from the account. I very rarely balance the account. Most of my PayPal activity is for items less than $50 or so, and I deposit a coupla hundred into the account when I am at the bank. Every 6 - 12 months (I guess) I’ll look at my balance and, if it is high I avoid depositing for a while. Also I have my business accounts at the same bank. If I were to overdraw a personal account, the bank would (but has never had to) take money from my business account (as it is a sole proprietorship).
Works for me.
We use our debit cards almost exclusively too. Afterward, the receipt goes into the wallet and then it takes less than 5 minutes or so to enter it into the check register (or Quicken or whatever preferred method) and instantly balance things.
I do mine by hand more often than not. I don’t write checks any more but keep my checkbook and register in my purse and it takes only a second to write the amount down at the time of purchase (if I don’t want to keep the receipts handy) it is quick and easy to keep a running tally this way that can be compared with the bank statement.
I don’t have a checkbook but I have a debit card and I keep track religiously of how much money I have left in cash and on my card. It’s important because I’m a student and not working, so I have to know at all times how much of my savings I have left. I didn’t do this before and I feel a lot less stressed now.
No in both cases–the family checkbook and my own personal one–but for different reasons.
For the family checkbook, we just didn’t do it for so long that we got out of the habit, and now we’re so backed up that it really would be a monumental undertaking to get it back in balance again. Fortunately, we’ve got a nice little nest egg in the bank account so it’s not really important if it balances to the penny because we won’t be overdrawn (it’s funny–the bank actually thinks we have significantly more money than we think we do, which is probably a result of a long-ago math error in the checkbook, so we use the number we think we have (the lower one) to keep track of things, so it’s even less of a worry).
In my own personal checkbook, I rarely spend money. I put some in every month and every once in awhile I buy something like a book or an electronic gadget or a WoW in-game item. I check the online balance maybe once every month or two for suspicious charges (never found any) and leave it at that.
This is another one of my financial quirks that developed when I was poor. My bank account consistently shows an amount higher than my personal records and I keep a certain amount as “padding”. This amount is mentally accounted for when I am balancing the accounts. It started years ago before online banking was the norm when I would have a little extra and just not write it in my check register (effectively hiding it from myself, even though I knew it was there) then my written number becomes what I have, and the extra would cover any mathematical errors or what have you.
These days that padding in our primary checking account has grown, so when I look at the bank statement first I deduct that amount and then balance it out from there. Today for example, the bank account said (random numbers not my actual finances) $4500, and I mentally deduct $2500 so I am only working with $2000 and that amount balances to the penny with what is written in my check register.
I know it is overly complicated but you would not believe the level of comfort that extra “hidden” money provides.
I keep a very close watch on my finances. I have a multi-tab spreadsheet file that I maintain on a weekly basis, enter in all my transactions (mostly as a fail-safe to make sure that I remember each one and there are no fraudulent ones), check it against the website, all that. I then email my spreadsheet to my gmail account so if my computer dies, I still have it.
I second this. Now that I have online banking, I check my account a few times a week to make sure all is in order, but no longer balance a checkbook. In all fairness, I only write somewhere between 2 and 3 checks a month. Everything else is online bill pay, or debit card transactions.
Every month, through Quiken. Online is very misleading, since it doesn’t cover checks that are written but which haven’t cleared.
I never write checks and pretty much never use a debit card. I make exactly one cash withdrawal per month and pay bills online perhaps twice per month. Everything else goes on my charge card, which I track on mint.com. Very easy.
So no, I do not balance a checkbook.
Yes. Well, kind of.
I’ve called the credit card company on small purchases that I couldn’t place, especially when the name looked funny. But if the small discrepancy was labeled “The Coffee Place,” for a price I’m likely to spend on coffee, I most likely wouldn’t notice it.
I chose both monthly and every couple of months. We have two accounts, one that’s only a checkbook, and one that’s used for every day spending. I don’t ever really balance the every day account, even though I know about how much is in there. I do however, every few weeks or month or so go back for the checkbook and make sure every check has been cashed, and then I use what the statement says to balance it out. I don’t write down every 0.10 interest payment in the ledger.
However, does everyone like Quicken? I bought it a couple of weeks or so ago since my wife kept saying how much everyone likes it. I can’t stand it. I keep having to fix little things in it to keep it balanced even though it gets our statements online. It’s been off by hundreds of dollars the second time it downloaded our statements. And then, because we refinanced our house and had a ton of money for a few weeks, we had almost 250K in our account. I could not figure out what the hell was going on. I liked have a quarter of a million in the bank, too bad it just didn’t exist. I just don’t think it does all that much that I can’t do except give a nice pretty pie graph. Not worth the $60 I spent on it.
I don’t like Quicken at all. Partially for reasons that you state, but also because of the “hidden money” I keep in my accounts which throws everything off and I just find it easier and quicker to do by hand.
My monthly budget isn’t even done as a spreadsheet (or graph or anything fancy) it is a list typed in notepad; my check register is kept by pen and comparing the numbers with the online statement and an open calculator window is easy-peasy and fast. Even though I balance the accounts several times a week, or maybe because of that, it never takes me more than a few minutes and is usually something I can do while I am waiting for breakfast to finish cooking so it is not something I agonize over or devote any set block of time for.
I’m pretty anal about making sure the numbers all match up - and Quicken is a real life-saver for that.
If you’re just looking for a tool to balance the checkbook, then Quicken may be overkill. But if you want to track spending by category (how much did you spend on medical bills last year for example, AWFULLY useful as a reminder when doing taxes), or how much money you’re putting into the 401(k) (and how those investments are doing), how much you’re really blowing on credit card interest every month, how much you’ve spent on home mortgage interest this year, etc… then Quicken is a wonderful tool.
If your numbers didn’t match then one of several things is at fault. You didn’t have the correct “starting balance”. You missed entering some transactions. Your download failed somehow (one big culprit is if, say, I paid the doctor 40 dollars and got 40 bucks from the ATM, the download might try to link both of its transactions to the same 40 dollar payment). Basically, it’s almost certainly a user error.
I would try to stick with it for a couple of months - but only do your checking account at first. That’ll limit the amount of stuff you’re stressing over.
When we started doing Quicken, it was May or thereabouts. I entered (and re-balanced) all of our bank statements for that calendar year. Periodically I’d have to go and enter a new payment, for a check written the prior year that didn’t cash until March or whatever. Took me an entire weekend.
Then I did our first monthly checkbook reconciliation. All the math was already correct. I had missed a couple of checks for that month, which showed up when I step-by-step compared the bank statement to the Quicken register. I entered them on the fly.
I think it took me 20 minutes. My husband saw the look of rapture on my face and was jealous! 
Not sure what you mean about having the extra cash in the account and it not existing - it existed all right, it just wasn’t yours to spend.
For people who like to do “hidden money” - we did that for a while. I entered a withdrawal for the amount, but it simply never got “cleared” when balancing. When you balance in Quicken, you’re comparing the end-of-month figure from the bank, to the end-of-month cleared balance in Quicken. That means, transactions that you’ve confirmed either by checking them off the paper bank statement, or via downloading. The “hidden” money doesn’t factor into the cleared balance at all, you just ignore that transaction when reconciling.
Interesting. I, too, am a person that’s been through poverty, and I, too, balance to the penny.
Nope. There’s what, 30 or 40 debits/credits against my checking account in a month? And ten of them are recurring payments that are either exactly the same in any given month or close to it. After that, another 90% of them are my regular spots, and I will generally remember all of the days and amounts for my spending at the gas station/grocery store/bar/Best Buy/etc. So it’s really just a matter of making sure there is nothing extra in that batch, and then that the 2 or 3 random payments a month are amounts that I remember having spent.
The only thing that does bug me is when I write a check (maybe half a dozen of them a year) and it takes whomever I sent it to an extended amount of time to cash it.
Check-book? 
I haven’t written a paper check in years.
I selected “No, I keep track with ATM ‘check your balance’ or online options”.
There are so few transactions that pass through our checking account that anything unexpected will be blatantly apparent. Almost all our day to day spending is done through a credit card.
I don’t really know what the phrase means. However I check all the transactions on my account each month, if that’s the same thing.