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Intuitive Checking: Does Your Gut Tell You How Much to Spend?

What is the difference between dread and apprehension, and what does it have to do with my checking account?

For the purposes of this article, dread is when you know how much money you have in your checking account.  Apprehension is when you don’t know.
Nowadays, we are all encouraged to use our intuition.  The problem is, some of us are taking it a bit too far.  Intuition just doesn’t mix with numbers very well. To put it another way, using intuition to balance your checking account is pushing sanity to its furthest limit.  It’s pushing a lot of other stuff to the limit as well.  The same goes for using intuition in tax preparation – a nasty habit indeed.

Here are some signs that you may be an Intuitive Bookkeeper: 

  • You “feel” that there’s enough money in your account to go out for an expensive dinner.  You also “think” there’s enough money for that sweater at the mall. 
  • Your "spending strategy" consists of calling the bank every once in awhile to get your balance, then spending it. 
  • Every time the mail comes, you quickly look for overdraft notices so that you can intercept them before they reach your spouse.
  • You just try to spend as little money as possible.  That way, it doesn’t matter whether you balance your bank statements or not!
  • In your checkbook register, you “round up” your purchases to the nearest dollar, and when you get paid, you start over as though you had a zero balance before the deposit (true story).

All of these practices, except for the last one, can produce feelings of apprehension.  Apprehension often comes with the practice of “intuitive bookkeeping,” which brings me to the subject of dread.

We all want to avoid feeling dread.  Dread is bad.  The trick is, even though apprehension is usually preferable to dread, if you don’t keep track of your receipts, the dread is going to come anyway.  So you can have your dread and also your electricity, or you can experience apprehension – the special kind of apprehension that comes when you search for your power bill in the dark.  “Did I pay the bill?  Or is this just a blackout?”  (Note: We have found that if the power does get shut off, you will have guests at the same time.)

Obviously, all of this involves keeping track of receipts.  This activity is not something that we should be allowed to do, since some of us can't even find our cars.  But we will try to give some pointers here.

How to keep track of receipts:

  • Always put receipts in the same place in your wallet or handbag.
  • Transfer receipts to a file or container that you keep in one place at home.
  • Decide when you are going to enter the receipts.  Schedule it.
  • Don’t think in terms of “entering ALL receipts.”  Decide on a reasonable time frame and then stop.
  • Consider using a “body double” – someone to keep you company while you do the dreaded work.  Some people find that simply having someone in the room (quietly doing their own thing, or perhaps helping with minor tasks) while they are working serves as an anchor to help them attend to the task at hand.   

We recommend Microsoft Money for keeping track of your finances, which is a shame because they aren’t paying us a dime for saying so. 

Nonetheless, we have found it to be quite helpful – it’s not rigid AT ALL. If you don’t want to categorize, fine – and if you do categorize, viola! Instant budget! 

If your bank is compatible with the online banking features built into Microsoft Money, you’ll be done with your record keeping in no time.  If your bank doesn’t offer online banking, switch banks!