When it comes to balancing our books, I'm a Quicken addict. And beyond that, I'm a perfectionist. So whenever I sit down to reconcile our bank statements with our check register and Quicken, I just can't stand discrepancies. It's so bad that I'll spend a ton of time poring over our check register searching for the error that made it fail to agree with Quicken's bottom line.

In fact, even if I'm absolutely certain that the balance in Quicken is right, I'll still search out the math error that caused the discrepancy rather than simply correcting the balance in our checkbook. Last night, for example, I was catching up on some bookkeeping and I wound up with a $0.26 difference between Quicken and our checkbook. It took me about twenty minutes, but I was ultimately able to track this back to a simple math error in our check register. When all was said and done, I actually considered myself to be lucky, as I've been known to obsess over things like this for better than an hour. Admittedly, a part of the problem is that I often let things pile up for as long as three months, and then put in a marathon session of getting Quicken back up to speed. Thus, when an error crops up, it can take extra long to pick through and find it.

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"Obsessive Compulsive Checkbook Balancing" was first published at fivecentnickel.commortgage calculator