Why Not to Balance Your Checking Account
A favorite complaint among conservatives is about how schools don't teach what they should. Well, let's all cheerfully admit that this is true. Schools, in some theoretical world, should basically be places where children learn to learn and where they grow in curiosity, to want to learn more.
All right, stop laughing. We know this doesn't happen, and at least in the mindless government schools that most children are stuck in, and never will.
My complaint is with what these conservatives want to be taught. It's usually stuff like how to sew a button on a shirt or change a car's oil. But whatever different things these lists give, there's always one that's right up there: balancing a checking account.
Do you, gentle reader, ever balance your checking account? I didn't think so. To summarize, balancing a checking account is making sure you and your financial institution have the same figures. By a couple of steps, you and they should have precisely the same number. The dirty secret is that it's virtually guaranteed that any discrepancy will be nothing substantial. Instead, you may think that you have - and I'm not making this up - 7 cents more in the account than the bank shows in their statement. And the neurotics among us will actually spend an hour or two trying to figure out what went wrong.
For 7 cents. Think about that. For a few pennies, you would spend any time at all doing this? No one cares. No one should care. Your financial institution has big computing capacity and they're taking care of it. Are those computers capable of error? Of course. But the odds against it not being corrected almost immediately are extremely slim.
Next time, I'll mention several economic things you SHOULD know. Stay tuned.