Daily Money Management

I've always been fairly careful about how I account for my money, so I've made it a point not to bounce checks. During my adult life, it's only happened three times that I can recall. Once, when I was in college and my credit union "lost" a deposit, once when I was working and my bank made a mistake with an electronic deposit, and once when my wife wrote a check she shouldn't have because she wasn't paying attention.

Now I've had many close calls, but I've managed to avoid them simply because I make it a point to check my online account balances every day.

I have a routine set up. First thing every morning I open up my checkbook management software and instruct it to download transactions for all my accounts. Next, I go to the Web sites that don't support automatic transactions, and I manually download those. When all the downloading is finished, I look at each account, see what transactions have cleared and check to make sure everything is as I expect it to be.

Usually, things are as I expect. My wife has accused me of being "obsessive" about the checking account, but because I do this, I've avoided several potential disasters:

• One of our business credit cards was fraudulently used, and I discovered a $1,900 transaction had occurred in a foreign country I'd never visited.
• My credit union erroneously used my checking account to pay someone else's utility bill.
• Check my wife had written without telling me, which would have caused the account to be overdrawn.
• Deposits that were credited to my account, and then disappeared the following day.

Call me obsessive, but keeping an electronic eye on the checkbook seems to keep me out of trouble. Since it only takes a few minutes each day, the time is definitely worth the peace of mind.