Keeping account: Financial records by way of pencil, paper

Still a winning combo: Graphite and pressed pulp.

A few weekends ago I bought a checking ledger at Staples, a physical record into which I can scribe my financial transactions. Even more archaic? I paid for it in cash -- with exact change. In today's world of online transactions, online bank statements, and Mint, my sense is most  my age would find a physical ledger an antique and my desire to manually note each deduction and deposit old fashioned.

I'm anal about few things, but the amount of money I have at my discretion is one of them. It stems from my days fresh out of college in the early '00s, when I didn't have much money to spend on food and rent, let alone anything else. I liked to know what was available to me, to the penny.

In recent years I got away from the habit of staying on top of my balance. I believe it corresponds to the increased use of my debit card. The more I swiped, the more I had to keep track of, and sitting down to balance my checkbook required keeping tally of those increased transactions. If I missed a few days (or weeks), the task became more onerous. Nothing frustrates me more than when my balance summary as viewed online doesn't jive with what I'm seeing in my ledger. I was getting frustrated a lot over the last couple of years; strangely, even more so after my brief foray into using a ledger template in Excel earlier this year. I don't know what happened there.

So from now on it's back to the physical ledger, but one that's larger and easier to write in than that included in each box of checks. Sometimes old fashioned is just easier.