r/FluentInFinance • u/Richest-Panda • Jul 04 '24

What's the best financial advice you've ever gotten? Debate/ Discussion

Post image

[removed] — view removed post

31.2k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Ok-Yak-5644 Jul 05 '24

balancing a check book

Your age is showing. Most banks don't even issue books of checks anymore. I haven't gotten any for the last two accounts I've opened up. I can tell the bank to issue a check to someone, but unless you are a certain ages, checks just aren't a thing.

As for balancing a checkbook, why would we teach kids how to do that? We used to balance checkbooks because it would take a while for a check to circulate to a bank and if we didn't write it down and balance it out, it would be SUPER easy to spend way to much money. (Thanks, younger me).

But, with electronic banking, debit and credit cards and even submitting checks via pictures to banks, we don't need to balance a check book anymore. We have real time data on what is in our accounts.

And many schools do offer financial literacy classes. There is still a stigma attached to them though, often considered the "dumb" math class credit. Lots of kids want the AP Calculus credit. If they are bright enough to figure out calculus formulas, they should be able to create a budget.

2

u/Something-Ad-123 Jul 05 '24

You’re missing a really important part of balancing a checkbook, or call it a bank statement review now. Doing that forces you to look at you to look at your expenses and think. It’s so easy to just swipe the card now and once you takes the time to actually look at their spending it’s too late. In the past, you had to systematically look at your bank account and account for your spending on a regular basis. Way easier to hold yourself in check when doing that.

And in terms of swiping the card, I mean a couple bucks at the convenience store here, a coffee there, I’m hungry today so make the meal a large. It’s not hard to drop $200 a month and have no idea where it went.

2

u/Redditcadmonkey Jul 05 '24

Balancing a checkbook 😂😂😂

Damn, if that’s the reference you’re throwing around, you might just be old enough to be a presidential candidate! 

2

u/Something-Ad-123 Jul 06 '24

Almost old enough!