Balancing / Imbalance [housekeepery, kind of]

[rebeccmeister]

I still balance my checkbook by hand, or at least cross-check my analog checkbook register against my bank and credit card statements on a regular basis. Because reasons, I decided to work on that yesterday. The previous time I had updated my checkbook register was back in March. So THAT project took a long while. I don't like falling behind on that project, so I mostly feel a sense of relief over getting caught up so that I know how much money is currently in my possession and where I've been spending it.

There are storms blowing in today, so the barometric pressure changes are doing obnoxious things to my sinuses, making it even harder to work up the energy and focus to grade papers. I do not like this pony ride one bit.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Cheques are almost totally out of fashion here now- I can't recall the last time I wrote one and a lot of businesses no longer accept them.

[rebeccmeister]

They're generally out of fashion in the U.S. as well. I still use checks for a handful of functions where there aren't great alternative payment methods. For example, my landlord would accept app-based payments, but I really don't want any of my personal financial information on my phone. Since he won't do direct bank transfers for some reason, checks are the compromise.

This has me wondering, though - I distinguish between two accounts, one as checking and one as savings. Is that sort of structure common?

[cmcmck]

We have both current accounts and saving accounts- our own plus joint ones, so I guess it probably is.

[rebeccmeister]

Oh, interesting terminology difference! "Current account" seems more accurate for a country that has moved past paper checks.

It was interesting to travel in Europe at a point where chip readers were common, before they became common in the US. I guess the US is slower to adopt newer financial transaction methods.

[mallorys_camera]

I balance my checkbook by hand, too. The amounts seldom match! They're never off by a sgnificant sum, but still. It pisses me off. 😊

[rebeccmeister]

Haha, yep. Those darned numbers always manage to jump around in surprising ways!

[scrottie]

This is kind of random, but when I started printing cheques off in a Ruby program that generates Postscript, I created a shell script to run that, and now my cheque ledger is a shell script that invokes a Ruby program. Past commands to generate a cheque get commented out, and then text comments added when they clear. I can confirm from first hand experience that this system is less bad than using Quickbooks. Some other thoughts here but that's really enough.

[rebeccmeister]

I'm just going to TROLOLOL at "less bad than using Quickbooks." I suspect you're right!