For help with your personal finance and to download our free debt snowball calculator, go to mydebtsnowballculator.com.

It takes merely a minute or two. It requires only basic math unless of course you use a Excel or QuickBooks or some other program which does the entries for you. It simply must be completed in order to know your accurate financial position at all times. It is the only way to know just the amount of money you really have on hand. Yet there are millions of people that don’t keep a checking account register and don’t reconcile their checking account, ever, much less each month.

I have heard this from family and friends: “I simply take a look at my bank account online to figure out the amount of money I actually have”. And, predictably, there are times where a check is delayed to clear or a debit card transaction is late to process or they miss an online scheduled payment or they overlook a recurring online payment and their bank account gets overdrawn which often results in a domino effect in their account and they are hit with $300 in overdraft fees.

Your checking account register will always keep an accurate balance of your account. This gets rid of all of the above scenarios. You’ll have reported a check having been written which means you’ll have already reduced that amount from your account.

Record Payments When You Schedule Them

Write down the expenditures on the day you schedule them, not when they are planned to post. Should you set up an online disbursement for three weeks down the road, enter that payment in your register immediately. If you are hoping to do it later, and fail to remember, you run the chance of overdrawing your checking account and knocking that first domino over. It’s important to get used to recording transactions as they happen.

Get Receipts

I constantly get receipts. No matter whether that be on my debit card or with cash, I always get a receipt. Because of this I know absolutely how much I have expended and can list it in my register when I get home. A lot of times the transactions don’t show up online right away or they don’t show the correct amount. Should you get a receipt, you know precisely the amount you spent.

Steps to Keeping Your Account Register

Below are the guidelines I take to keep my account register. It really is extremely easy. I use the actual spreadsheets that are in the Debt Snowball Calculator workbook.

1. Record the date you are making the transaction, scheduling the transaction, writing the check or withdrawing the money
2. Document to whom the payment is being sent
3. Enter the amount of the payment
4. Be sure you do the math to keep a running total of your actual balance
5. Monitor your account online so you know the payment processes and processes for the correct amount. If necessary, make adjustments to your register.
6. Mark the payment as cleared

That is all there is to it. I check my account online a minimum of twice a week to make certain my records are accurate as well as to be sure the bank’s records are correct. Additionally, I use it to enter when payments clear. If a payment doesn’t clear promptly, it may indicate the recipient never received it or applied it wrong. Should this you should contact them immediately to get it straightened out.

Keeping an account register is quick and extremely simple. It does not maker sense not to do it. There really are no excuses. If you overdraw your account, it is your fault. You cannot fault the bank for your error. Payments process and clear when they process and clear. If you keep an accurate register, you won’t have to worry about it.