Balancing your checkbook

I'm old fashioned. I know this. I do many of the things that people's grandmas' used to do. One of the those things that I just can't believe that people don't do, is keep a checkbook registry (and a similar concept for credit cards too). It is pretty simple. It has gone away slowly. Starting with carbon copy check books, where a copy of what you wrote the check out for gets saved in your checkbook so that you don't slow down the grocery line. What? Nobody writes checks for groceries anymore? Really, nobody should be standing in line for groceries anymore either, with Covid and modern online grocery shopping being such a great thing (not the covid part, of course). But you get the idea. Everyone talks about finances as though there is a mystical person running their lives. They don't know how much they spend for X. As a lifelong balancer of the checkbook, I could tell where my money was going, especially when I balanced out what I thought I spent with what the bank thought I spent. Almost always, the error was in my favor, usually because I made a mistake and entered things more than once. Sometimes, I was shocked to learn that I didn't have 2 nickels to rub together, when I thought I had money, because i forgot to enter a check or some other payment. Maybe an ATM receipt didn't get spit out and I ignored it. That was on me. I should have written it down. So what brought this up? I was talking with my wife about some businesses that we work with tended to be a bit fast an loose with the EFTs. Funds dropping when it wasn't unexpected, differences from what they said and what they did, mostly around planning for big chunks of money to disappear from our accounts. We've also had some issues with Quicken because we use it the old fashioned way. We enter our spending manually, and then compare to what the bank has for us. Which seems to be very different from their normal user base, because they start most conversations asking about downloading transactions from your bank. Which can be cool (like Mint, and YNaB and others), then it does what the computer thinks it should do with the charges and credits. It just doesn't feel like I won't lose $10 here and there to people that hack my account.