this wasn't in the plan |but life is still pretty good

I wonder how many people still keep their checkbooks balanced.

Credit cards, online bill pay, and online banking in general might be sending checkbooks the way of the dodo.  When I used my debit card a lot, I had to keep track of my spending in order to avoid running out of money there.  With a credit card, you don't really need to worry about that and it's certainly easy to know when you're out of cash.  But regardless of what method you use to spend your money,  it's important to have a method of keeping track of what you spend.

The Tall One and I are some of those nut cases that keep track of all their expenses manually.  This means we enter each and every purchase and transaction into Quicken. I like this because I know where my money goes.  It helps me stay on track.  Sometimes, I'll get behind when it comes to entering my receipts.  When this happens, I'm often surprised at how much I've spent in a certain area.  I try and keep a running budget total in my head, and it can be more accurate when I frequently manually enter in receipts.

I'm guessing the other choice for us would be to download all our transactions from our bank and credit cards (and this would be the bulk of our monthly transactions) straight into Quicken.  We've done it before, but I don't like it.  Aside from the fact that I feel like manually entering them helps us keep track of things, I like making sure everything is correct, that the numbers coming from the credit card match the numbers on our receipts.

It can be hard to keep up with everything manually, especially when we spend cash.  We have a misc. category that we use sometimes when we don't know where some money went.  Overall, though, we've gotten pretty good at holding onto receipts.

So, that's what works for me, what works for you? How do you keep track of what you spend?