I was chatting with a co-worker the other day. She was telling me that she had finally set up an account for her daughter to teach her how to handle money and deal with a debit card. I agreed that it was an important thing for her to learn. We had done the same with Man-Child when he was in high school.
She then went on to tell me about trying to teach her daughter about balancing the check book. I looked at her in shock and then uttered, "But...she can see all her transactions online...she doesn't really need to actually balance the check book..."
My co-worker figures that she balances her check book and that her daughter should as well. Despite the fact that her daughter will probably never actually write out a check in her life.
Now, I don't know about you, but we (The Husband or myself) haven't balanced a check book in YEARS. We write so few actual checks these days; maybe about three a year - in fact up until recently we had been using checks that had our address from three houses ago - that there doesn't seem to be much of a point to it. Yes, we check our activity online to make sure that we aren't being compromised but in our minds, as long as the bank is recording our transactions we are pretty squared up.
So here's the question, are we the weird ones? Is everyone else still physically balancing their check books?
I'll be quite relieved to hear we aren't the only ones, if that is the case, because if I have to go back to the nightmare that balancing a check book was for me, I may just cry. Or better yet, I'll pretend I never read that I should be doing it.
I balance an actual checkbook, and write checks each week for bills. (I'd tried to set them up with online payments, but then our credit card keeps being compromised and then everything had to be re-set each time. Or else money was directly withdrawn from our bank account and I felt like we could be overdrawn without me knowing it.)
ReplyDeleteBut when we went to make some changes to our account recently, the early-20s bank clerk said to me earnestly, "I see you Still Use Checks. So you might be interested in this account that comes with free checks!" And then when he was setting up our online access, he assumed I wouldn't know what a user name was. Those things together communicated very nicely that I was an anomaly.
OMG - I hate when my credit card gets compromised because I have so much tied to it. I hate trying to go back and update my card info. I missed my land line phone bill this last time and siince we aren't on top of opening our mail (because everything looks like a letter trying to sell additional services) we got dangerously close to having our phone service cut off. I feel for businesses that try to bill us for a random charge, because if it isn't set up on autodebit it is going to take them a while to get paid.
DeleteI write two checks a year, that's it. And no, I haven't balanced a checkbook in years, but my sister still does. It makes her feel better to see every penny accounted for. It takes all kinds, Gigi. Good thing we're not all alike! :-)
ReplyDeleteI do not balance my checkbook anymore - thank the Lord for the ability to look at bank stuff online. It saves so much time to not deal with that little annoying task anymore. My dad is an accountant and incredibly type A. I am 46 years old, and I still worry that my father will discover my non-bank-balancing status.
ReplyDeleteWe don't write checks but my husband will save receipts and double check them in the checking account. He doesn't miss a thing. I just spend the money haha
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