I do it using Quicken once a month. My wife enters the checks and on-line payments every so often, and sees if there is a discrepancy - and then I find it. It is not a poverty thing for me, I just like knowing what we have, and we make enough arithmetic errors that it is useful to find and fix them. She is self-employed, so she also uses Quicken for work expenses.
Balancing checkbooks can easily cause mistakes, too, especially when banks don’t immediately cash a check or whatever. We pay close attention online every week.
It’s definitely a poverty thing for us. I remember some humiliating times. I don’t want to go back to them.
Balance my checkbook? Next you will be asking if I wind my watch, caveman!
All my daily debit, payment, loan amounts, income, etc are available to me just as quickly as logging on to the bank web site.
How anyone can lose track of thier daily financial situation is beyond me. If something goes amiss, if there is an error or a fraudulent charge, or pending problem, I will discover it the next morning while having breakfast and checking the morning news.
Any issue will be only hours old before I discover it.
Quicken
It’s not a matter of losing track of daily financials, it’s about “the dog that doesn’t bark” - unposted checks, unprocessed auto-payments, and about projecting based on solid past activity. There is also a psychological value; the detailed tracking that keeps spending down (sorta like counting calories keeps the eating in check).
I don’t balance it anymore. I go online and look for unauthorized charges and such, but really I don’t need to balance it. I have one checking for saving and rent, the other is for bills. The bills get paid via computer so I know exactly what is in there so there’s no need to balance.
Another formerly very poor person that balances every month, too the penny in Quicken. It just gives me peace of mind and has once in 15 years saved me when a teller at a drive up window mixed up my deposit with the person that went through before me. (This was back before direct deposit.) So I was suddenly missing a whole paycheck into my account. Luckily the bank was able to figure out what had happened.
Satch (now only mostly poor)
Nope, not really. I just check what’s happening in my account on-line.
I’m not sure if ‘balancing your checkbook’ is the correct term or it is reconciling. Anyway, I checked that I keep a mental balance; I do, but then I actually do a reconciliation every month or so. You see, I use Quicken for my checkbook, which, in my view, is much better and more accurate than those paper transaction ledgers or whatever they call them. Also, i rarely write checks any more, save for contributions to local charities and the church I attend. Most all of my bills are paid online these days.
If you’d have asked the question say 10 to 12 years ago, I would have said: Religiously, every month.
This is an excellent reason to keep your deposit slips. When my daughter went to Germany, the first thing she did was deposit a check for Euros into a new account. It never showed up, never showed up, never showed up. She finally went back with her deposit slip, and they found that the new teller at the window had never written her name or number on the deposit. They were able to find it thanks to her slip; if she had thrown it away she’d have been out of luck.
Yes, I do have a check book. Not everybody I pay money to accepts debit, so I have to write a few checks a month. I’d prefer not to, but that’s how some of my creditors roll, and I can’t force them to change. I balance mine several times a week, using Quicken. It usually automatically reconciles itself. I like having a hard copy of my balance to refer to and the computer is just a handy way to double-check that I’m balancing my account properly.
I balance my checkbook and update it with the online transactions (for example, I have some transfers that go to my savings accounts). My renter is check only, and, at least up to this month, if I paid my utilities online, I’d have to pay an extra $3-$4 fee. So I paid by check (and snail mail). Plus I do purchase things with checks.
I have no idea how much money is even in my checking account. I’ll check it now and then, and if the balance is very large then I move some into investments.
I track everything in Excel. I’ve been doing it pretty much my entire adult life.
I used to use a program called GNU Cash or something similar, but after a while it just became too much of a pain to keep up with.
Then I discovered mint.com, which keeps track of my bank account, savings, and credit card transactions. I can categorize all the transactions, so in this way, I do keep track of trends and budget my spending.
Yes. Every month. I pay most monthly bills by check and we use the debit card for “daily expenses.” I keep a running tally in the handy check register that comes with the box of checks (or that you can get from the bank for free).
Every month my bank sends me a statment in the mail. I cross-verify the charges on the statement with those in my register and balance it out. Takes about 15 minutes. The thing is, I like doing it. I’m not looking for a “Quicken” or other shortcut. I’ve done it this way for 25 years and see no reason to stop.
Years ago when money was tighter, I began using an Excel spreadsheet as my checkbook (I gather this is primarily what Quicken does, but I already have Excel and don’t see much need to pay for Quicken as well). I could forecast my regular expenses (rent/mortgage, utility bills) and paycheck deposits a year ahead of time, and see what my account was going to do.
Money is better these days, but I still forecast my expenses way out into the future so I can see when money should be moved into/out of the checking account. I reconcile it every few weeks with my real account information, generally by logging on via the web, rather than looking at the paper statement they mail me every month.
I use checks to pay for bills, not for shopping, and my debit card is used only for occasionaly withdrawals of cash from ATM’s, so the fact that my spreadsheet is anchored to my home PC isn’t really an issue.
Nope. I used to balance the checkbook religiously using Quicken; every account, every penny, but one day I just decided to stop. I really had no reason to do it to begin with other than my own OCD, and I quickly realized the liberation of not carrying around receipts in my wallet. My bank even gave me a $5 credit to turn off paper statements and switch to entirely e-statements. 
I’ve been Quicken-free for a couple years now, and can’t imagine going back to the old self-balancing method. My bank has a website and a mobile app for my iPhone that give me my balance, if I need it.
Where’s the option for “Yes, every single time I deposit money or write a check?”
This is what I do as well. I enter transactions weekly (I open the bank’s web site and write any transactions that have occurred in my check register), pay bills every other week, and balance all my accounts monthly. There’s always a slight discrepancy between my register and the bank’s transaction list, and I hate not knowing what that is. I’ll also check the web site a couple of times a week if I’m worried about overdrawing.
ETA: I don’t get too concerned over any discrepancy less than a couple of bucks when I’m balancing the account though. I don’t go searching for every last penny–I’ll just let Quicken put in a balance adjustment for small discrepancies.
I track absolutely everything with GNU Cash these days; chequing, savings, cash, retirement, even PC Points.
I lived far enough below my means for years so all I did was peek at my checking account every few months and kick over the excess to savings (on top of my normal automatic transfers from every paycheque). Settling up rent/shared expenses with my roomates was a pain in the ass when doing everything from memory but I was to lazy to change.
Once I bought my car in October cashflow has become tight enough that I finally buckled down and got GNU Cash. It’s free, double-entry and let’s me see at a glance account balances, what my roomies owe, and it’s easy to generate reports to see where I’m spending. It was jaw-dropping to see what I was spending on eating-out/prepared foods.