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Are You Friends With Your Checkbook?

August 20, 2014 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

signingcheck
Who couldn’t be friends with this guy?

Most of us strive to try to keep a budget each month. Everyone has fixed costs that have to be covered, such as the rent or mortgage, insurance, and food. Some people call these a “monthly nut”, but I’m not a squirrel. I like to call these “necessary expenses” and have tracked them over time. For many people keeping to a budget was easier years ago. Nowadays, are a ton of electronic payment methods available. Their convenience makes spending money we do not have that much more tempting. Impulse buying becomes easier – all you have to do is swipe either your debit card or your credit card.

This can result in a well-planned budget getting out of the water. Maybe I’m showing my age, but I remember when people would write checks at the grocery store. It slowed everything down. As one of those “quick swipe” credit card people I found this really annoying.

Looking back on it today, I have to respect it a bit. Those people actually spent time balancing a checkbook, so they knew exactly how much money they had. It was a great system for accountability reasons. With today’s credit cards a lot of that accountability is gone.

I have to admit that I’m not very good friends with my checkbook nowadays. I thought about it for a bit and here are some of the reasons why:

  1. I’m Lazy – I type thousands of words a day. It may sound crazy, but I barely know how to use a pen anymore. Adding an item to a grocery list is comical.
  2. I Don’t Need the Accountability – I spend more than enough time thinking about money by writing for this site. In return this website gives me accountability.
  3. Checks can be Expensive – Last year I switched bank accounts. It’s a long story, but since my tenants wouldn’t get out when the lease was over, I had to stop accepting payment from them in order to evict them. However, they had the ability to automatic deposit money in my bank account, which allowed them to stay indefinitely… unless I switched bank account numbers.

    So I switched, but that required getting all new checks. It was well over $25 for 120 checks of the very most basic design. That’s almost half the cost of a stamp, simply to use my own money. I decided to go home and order cheap checks online. It was much, much cheaper. Not only that, but the bulk pricing was much better my bank’s.

Sorry Mr. Checkbook, but for now we’ll just have to be occasional acquaintances.

Filed Under: Banking, Budgeting, Credit Cards Tagged With: checkbook, credit card debt, debit card, electronic payment methods, impulse buying, spending money

SmartyPig: Gift Card Redeemed

June 14, 2008 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

smartypig-logo.jpgLast week, I finally got around to starting up my SmartyPig account again. You may recall that I had trouble when I tried in the past. However, the questions their verification partner asked me about my financial accounts did not match what I knew to be true of my financial accounts. SmartyPig promptly mailed the documents necessary for me to be manually verified and once I got around to filling it out, set me up right away. I’d have to give them an A+ for customer service, but then I might not be the typical customer as they asked me to try out their service.

So with my gift card in hand and an activated SmartyPig account, it was time to see if I can deposit this gift card. The first thing I did when I logged in was go to the tab that said, Redeem a Gift Card (makes sense, right?). When I got there, the page said that I had to add a bank account first. My heart sank, thinking that this was going to take 3-4 days while SmartyPig deposits a few cents in my account and I verify that later (something that I’ve done with a couple of financial institutions in just the last week). I was pleasantly surprised that this was not necessary – I was able to set up my bank account right away.

Setting up the bank account was fairly easy, but it took me two tries. One of the pieces of bank information that SmartyPig asks is the bank’s phone number. I had expected to only need my checkbook for bank routing numbers and account numbers. For the phone number, I had to retrieve my wallet. Though I’m Lazy, I’m not that Lazy, so this didn’t upset me much. I pulled out my bank card to look on the back and entered in the number in the format of 1800xxxxxxx as I didn’t see SmartyPig request a specific format. I then put the card and wallet away and focused on the routing numbers. When I had finished entering those, I submitted the form. Turns out that I didn’t enter the phone number in the xxx-xxx-xxxx format. So I had to get out my card again and re-enter the number. But I also had to re-enter my bank account’s information again since the form didn’t say that. A suggestion to SmartyPig: either be very clear about the format of the phone number you want or accept pretty much any form that a person could put in.

So now that I had my bank account set-up it was finally time to enter in my gift card. I go to the Redeem a Gift Card tab and enter in my gift card serial number and pin. I get ready to click submit, but I realize there’s no submit button, just one that says Decline This Card. That scares me quite a bit, I fear if I click that it will void the card and all my work will be for nothing. I do notice some text after the pin that says I haven’t set up a savings goal yet, so I couldn’t redeem the gift card yet. I don’t know why it asked me for the serial number rather than just tell me to set up a savings goal. Once I set up a savings goal, I could easily redeem the card.

I set up my goal to be $250, which I estimate is how it’s going to cost me for an upgraded Asus Eee after I sell my old Asus Eee. With the gift card I’m 20% of the way there. I’m happy that my account will be earning a decent interest rate of 3.90%.

Overall, I think SmartyPig has a great idea, but a few minor things need to be ironed out. Once they clear up the minor usability issues, my only question is about the idea of the gift card. If you know someone has a SmartyPig account the gift card is a fantastic gift idea. If the person does not have a SmartyPig account set up, I think there are too many hoops to jump through (the issues I had in signing up, setting up and linking a new bank account, giving up your social security number to another place, having to create a specific savings goal). I would only get someone a SmartyPig gift card after I exhausted the options of cash, checks, savings bonds, Amazon gift card, or an Ebay gift card.

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: account numbers, bank information, bank routing numbers, checkbook, customer service, financial accounts, financial institutions, gift card, savings, SmartyPig, typical customer, wallet

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