Eh, the checkbook’s close enough!
March 8th, 2006 | by mbhunter |The venerable Liz Pulliam Weston talks about 10 Easy Ways to Stash Away Thousands.
She makes the point that these ten easy ways are gimmicks:
- Pad your accounts by writing a check to yourself, but not cashing it.
- Cull your bills – take out all of the fives, tens, twos, whatever, and put them in a savings jar.
- Tax yourself and your family to save up for big family expenses.
- Save your work reimbursements in a savings account instead of spending them.
- Save your rebates.
- Round up debits and/or round down deposits in your checking register.
- Charge yourself fees for each check you write.
- Save your raises.
- Save one hour’s pay either every day or every week.
- Pay yourself last, as well as first. Save some of your pay at the beginning of the month, but also save what you don’t spend at the end of the month!
Some comments on these tips:
Tips 2, 3, and 8 are good ones, and they remind me of Jeffrey Strain’s SaveMoneyGames.com site. We exercise tip 2 with our change.
I rarely write checks these days, but my wife does, and she would go absolutely stark-raving mad if the checkbook doesn’t balance to the penny. So tips 1, 6, and 7 would be out for us. If you only need a warm fuzzy about your checkbook balance, then the padding will help you. One warning about these kinds of tips, though, is that you get used to having the padding, so you might say to yourself, “I can write a check for $20 over my balance because I have the padding.” This can get you into trouble the same way that setting your clocks five minutes fast can get you into trouble.
Would using these tips bug you, too? Do you need your checkbook balanced to the penny?
3 Responses to “Eh, the checkbook’s close enough!”
By samerwriter on Mar 8, 2006 | Reply
I’m not a big fan of any of those ideas except #10 (pay yourself first and last). I think this really is a superset of #8 and #9; we set our budget, and keep everything above and beyond the budget in savings (actually all our money is direct deposited to our savings account, and we withdraw $X per month to cover our budget).
Most of the other ideas seem to complicate matters — like your wife, I wouldn’t be willing to not have my checkbook balance. How do you make sure you didn’t miss an expenditure or deposit that way? I also have a general concern with account cushions in that they remove the downside of “going negative” in your account. That is, it’s too easy to rely on the cushion.
By mbhunter on Mar 8, 2006 | Reply
Thanks for the comments samerwriter! I like the idea of putting things in savings first then withdrawing from there. We have ours put directly into checking, but we also have a number of automatic payments each month. We’re more comfortable with the money in the right account by default.
Usually when I deposit “extra” money from rebates, etc., it does go into the savings account.
By m@ on Mar 8, 2006 | Reply
The best tip to go along with #4 and #5 is Flex Spending Account reimbursements. Tax free (well, going in) savings.