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Weekly Checking Account Balance & Bills Paid

November 17th, 2006 · 2 Comments

I wrote previously that we balance our checkbook and pay bills on a weekly basis.  We’ve done this for years now and it has kept our finances easy to manage.  In the early years of the marriage we used to do this together.  We would sit down and get all the receipts and bills (we store them in one central location).  One person would read the information about the receipt out loud, while the other person would enter the data into Quicken (the software we use to manage our finances).  This was great because it forced us to talk about our finances and made us both accountable for them.  We always felt it was important that each of us knew and took responsibility for our financial situation. 

We have continued the weekly posting update (as we like to call it) but now we alternate turns.  I do the posting one week and he does it the next.   This week was my turn.  I posted all the receipts and paid all the bills.  I noticed that the property taxes bill is due soon and we will get a discount by paying it before November 30.  I will be writing more on that in the next day or so.   

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Tags: Personal Finance

2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Not Made Of Money : Paid The Property Taxes Bill - Got The Early Discount // Nov 22, 2006 at 2:39 pm

    [...] As I mentioned during last week’s regular paying the bills, our property tax bill was coming due. We pay our property taxes and homeowner insurance ourselves, rather than allowing the mortage company to collect it in escrow throughout the year. We did this for several reasons. First, the mortage company seemed to have difficulty paying the homeowner insurance on a timely basis. We would get letters from the insurance company that it had not been paid. Second, the mortage company would not calculate the escrow amounts correctly and would always estimate on the “high” end. When we refinanced the mortage a few years ago, we set it up so that the mortgage company would not collect the escrows. [...]

  • 2 Not Made Of Money » Meeting Grocery Budget Goals - Almost There // Jan 24, 2007 at 10:21 am

    [...] I’ve been working on getting the grocery bill decreased.   In December we reviewed our Quicken reports and realized that the spending on our grocery bill was much higher than we had budgeted.  That is one of the many great features of using Quicken for tracking finances.  It is very easy to find out what you spent on any category of purchases from entertainment to food costs to medical expenses.  This is dependent, of course, on how accurately you enter the information in to Quicken.  Since we update our finances on a weekly basis, it has never been too much of a burden.  However, I find that if I am tired when doing the weekly update, I may not do as many “split” transactions as my husband does, because he will really hunt through every receipt and make sure that every item is categorized exactly.  I may just “round the numbers” and lump stuff into “household” if the majority of items on the receipt are household related, such as when I shop at Target.  [...]

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