How often do you check your accounts?

[MoonLiteNite]

I have looked at my bank account every day since i was 13 years old.
Now that i am really pushing hard for FI by the age of 45, i find myself checking my 401k almost every pay period, as well my IRA, LC, and normal stock account (have to check that every day)

I figured the weekly peaks at the IRA and 401k are just a new thing and ill get tired of looking at it sooner or later. (been 6 months already...)


Was wondering if anyone does this all the time or did it when they first started really building up their stache!

[marty998]

I check the bank account to see when known receipts have come in and known payments have gone out. Quite easy to do it and manage the accounts on the bank app.

Try not to check it too often less I go mad. But it's nice to see things go up :D

[andy85]

checking/credit cards...pretty much daily
savings/retirement accounts...1-2 times per month

[Lake161]

I check the bank account to see when known receipts have come in and known payments have gone out. Quite easy to do it and manage the accounts on the bank app.

Try not to check it too often less I go mad. But it's nice to see things go up :D

+1

Also, I don't track my investment accounts on Mint/YNAB so I avoid the temptation to check them all the time.

As I am post-FIRE, I check my investments once a quarter when I decide how much to withdraw for the next quarter. I use a combination of planned expenses plus investment performance to decide how much to pull.

[pjhalifax]

I check our joint checking account weekly to track deposits and bill payments. Investments, I probably look at quarterly at most but I've trained myself to ignore them for the most part.

Took some work to get to this point, though. I was a compulsive checker in the past. I hope this thread doesn't get me started again. :)

[boarder42]

i check stocks and retirement daily. i check everything daily more or less b/c i just look at personal capital every morning.  i find it fun to look at. 

[neo von retorch]

I built software some time in 2003, and I've tracked almost every transaction in all of my accounts since then. I even used to track my escrow accounts, but I managed to convince myself that I don't need to do that.

I check my bank account at least once per day. Sometimes more often, but there's almost no point because stuff pretty much either shows up in the morning, or it doesn't. (Some things do seem to hit later in the day, though. And car payments happen right at 6:30 PM. Mortgage payments happen at 9:30 PM. If I prepay my mortgage, the money leaves checking instantly, but only comes out of the mortgage at 9:30 PM.)

I check my 401k every Wednesday just to confirm that the most recent contribution/match has landed.

I don't look at my IRA/investments much any more. I used to all the time. Now, I generally just check them quarterly (i.e. early October after 3 month statement comes in) and I then log any dividends, fees and change in value to my software at that point.

I tend to check credit card accounts often - not quite daily. (Usually not at all on the weekends.) I manually keep track of all transactions in my software.

[begood]

I check the checking account whenever a new bill comes in or I'm expecting a payment.

I check savings, CDs, and my husband's 403(b) on  the fifteenth of every month.

I check our other investments - rollover IRA and taxable account - every quarter, on the fifteenth of the month.

I check our 529 and Coverdell once a year, if that. I shouldn't need them for four more years. We did adjust the AA on them last year to be a little more conservative, since we'll need them within five years, but beyond that, they are free to do their thing. :)

[sisto]

I have everything in MINT so I pretty much check it all daily and sometimes more than that. I'm trying to get better at just ignoring some of it, but it's really hard since it's all right there.

[dcheesi]

Minimum of once a month, usually more like once a week for my bank accounts.

[Trudie]

I have a dashboard online and check it daily (too damn much)!

But I check my bank account a couple of times a week to keep an eye out for specific transactions and fraudulent transactions.

I call my credit card company every ten days or so to monitor balances and make sure weird stuff hasn't come through.

[HPstache]

Embarrassingly often

[MrsDinero]

Checking account and primary savings account (same bank) I review daily.


All others (401k, Vanguard, Ally Savings Account) I typically check weekly.  Part of it is making sure I can log into all my accounts, but I also have 2FA on most accounts and that doesn't always play nice with mint.

[RWD]

Once every other week on pay day to enter all the transactions into GnuCash.

[BTDretire]

As of about 10 minutes ago, I was up $5,951 for the day, OK, no I don't normally calculate the dollar value.
I just check the direction.

To check the market direction I have Yahoo page with all my stock and index funds listed, I check it several
times a day if I'm near my computer, otherwise sometime before I go to bed.
 That way I know if I can afford fish eggs or chicken eggs for breakfast. :-)
 

[FLBiker]

If I'm at work (and thus sitting in front of a computer) I check Mint a couple of times a week.  If I'm not at work, I don't think I ever check it.

I don't really pay attention to my bank accounts, but I do enjoy seeing the retirement stash grow.  And sometimes, if I'm working on a particular credit card bonus, I check to make sure we've hit a minimum spend.

[ShoulderThingThatGoesUp]

Very rarely. It's all going the way it should be.

[hoodedfalcon]

This post has inspired me to check my accounts. :)

I check Mint daily. It isn't necessary at all since everything is automated - and I mean everything. I write 1-2 checks a year, and everything else is on autopay. But I am in debt emergency and just recently made it into positive net worth category (3 years ago I was at -90K!), so it is pretty exciting to check it.

[jim555]

I compile all accounts once a month.

[Capsu78]

I just checked in the last half hour so "busted!"  My next real "keyboard to excel" progress and net worth calculation event will be end of Q3...just started doing quarterly this year however- had only been doing year end before that.

[Rubic]

In the pre-Internet era, I would check my brokerage statements when they
arrived in the mail each month and file them.  Sometimes I'd let 2-3
statements arrive before I opened them up -- mainly because I was lazy
about typing up labels for for file folders.

The current hyper-connected world of daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute(!)
quotes is probably not beneficial to how most people should think of their
investments.  It has caused more than one investor to brag about their
returns over the past X days or Y months -- which is meaningless when
they ought to be thinking in terms of decades.

I recall that renowned investor Philip Fisher advised people not to pay
much attention to their monthly statements as it could skew their
long-term thinking.  He would probably be appalled at our fire hose of
useless data that everyone now possesses at their fingertips.

[frugaliknowit]

2 checking accounts daily, active cc account(s) daily (usually only 1 at a time), retirement/taxable mutual fund account monthly, unless I am reallocating in which case I log into verify everything went through correctly.

[Rubic]

I should probably add that I do check Mint daily because I'm churning
credit cards for travel and use it for tracking charges.

[MoonLiteNite]

Ok so i am not a lone duck who checks every day :D

[MoonLiteNite]

In the pre-Internet era, I would check my brokerage statements when they
arrived in the mail each month and file them.

When i was a kid i LOVED getting the savings account statement in the mail. Showed me that .02$ gain! My savings account didn't have online access at all

[WSUCoug1994]

Multiple times a day - I have a single view of all of my accounts, transactions, mileage plans, etc through BOA.  I find the movement interesting and gives me hope for the future...lol.  I am just always looking for fraud and for dividends.

[Spork]

I built software some time in 2003, and I've tracked almost every transaction in all of my accounts since then. I even used to track my escrow accounts, but I managed to convince myself that I don't need to do that.

Me, too.  I believe mine goes back to about 1990... though I admit those early years were not nearly as detailed as I got over time.  The very old data is archived -- with roll-up totals so I don't have to crunch every transaction going back that far.

I'm pretty obsessive about tracking/graphing everything. 

[Melisande]

Embarrassingly often

Ditto. For some reason, after I made this year's Roth IRA purchases I started checking my Vanguard accounts whenever the markets ended up. It's weirdly addictive but making me feel too materialistic.

[MoonLiteNite]

I do not see anything directly bad to checking alot. Unless you are actually wasting time and causing harm to yourself.
I guess the normal person could easily panic and sell shares on a bad month or something, but everyone here knows to just hold their index funds.

[Rural]

Checking and credit cards one every week or two when I pay bills, investment accounts every couple of months.


Nothing inherently bad about checking frequently, but it won't go up any faster that way either. :)

[Villanelle]

Checking is roughly weekly.  Savings is roughly monthly (it's used for almost nothing other than a rent check deposit, which I transfer out to another account).  Investment accounts is probably quarterly or less, unless I'm in the process of rebalancing or something like that. 

[BTDretire]

I have a hand written page tallying my NW next to my computer monitor.
I have calculated NW 15 times since 1-01-11. But I look at stock direction daily.
 The last 68 months have been berry, berry gud to me, and many of us, I suspect.

[Migs]

I look at my accounts everyday, but that's mostly because I'm on Mint or Personal Capital checking daily checking/cc transactions.

For investment accounts, I'll look into it with more depth when I need to rebalance - usually quarterly.

[johnny847]

Instead of checking my accounts I just set up email alerts any time a transaction occurs on my account. I then set Gmail to filter most these to skip the inbox (so I'm not interrupted throughout the day). I usually check these emails once a day, sometimes once every other day.

Considering I have over 20 credit cards and 10 bank accounts, there's no way I could log into each one of them every day without driving myself crazy.

[Helvegen]

Checking/savings and the 3 credit cards I use the most: Basically every day.

Retirement/taxable brokerage: 1-5 days

HSA: Once a week or so - this is mostly to see if any employer incentives have hit yet or not. It takes them forever to deposit anything.

All accts: Biweekly.

[BTDretire]

Instead of checking my accounts I just set up email alerts any time a transaction occurs on my account. I then set Gmail to filter most these to skip the inbox (so I'm not interrupted throughout the day). I usually check these emails once a day, sometimes once every other day.

Considering I have over 20 credit cards and 10 bank accounts, there's no way I could log into each one of them every day
...
without driving myself crazy.

Have you checked lately?
1 credit card, 1 bank account.
Although I do have a Vanguard, Scottrade, a seperate HSA account,
hmm... maybe I'm 4/10 of the way to crazy.

[moof]

A couple times a week, which is way more often than I should.

The better question is how often you fiddle with it.  I fiddle with my maybe once a year.  Mostly I have stripped it back to a total market index fund, and an "everything but the S&P 500" index fund to underweight the big companies (I had seeing wild gyrations everytime Apple farts).

I lost track of an account once, a TSP account with about $5k in it.  I thought it was in an S&P500, so roughly 5 years later when I finally got my access reset I was disappointed to find it was still at $5k.  I mixed up their stupid letter fund decoder ring and moved it to securities by accident.  Not keeping tabs on that one cost me a couple thousand bucks.  Oh well.

[Monocle Money Mouth]

For me, it depends on the account. I check my credit card, primary checking, and 401(k) daily. If you're not paying attention, you can end up spending way more than you think you are or have fraud occurring without even knowing about it. I also like to see how the market shifts affect my 401(k) savings too.

I check my savings accounts whenever I'm moving stuff around or expecting an interest payment. I go from looking at it daily to not looking at it again for a couple of weeks depending on how active things are that month.

I check my HSA once a month just to see what kind of interest I earn.

[Yonco]

I downloaded a net worth spreadsheet. I fill it out every pay period(every 2 weeks). I have done this for the past 4 years and it always gets a smile on my face as I see it growing. A spreadsheet like this has liabilities and assets, about 20+ entrys. It takes about 2 mins to login and check balances and then fill out figures. Well worth it in my opinion.

[JLee]

Progress feels too slow if I check frequently.  I try to check retirement accounts once a month.  Checking is a few times a month (I generally have transfers into the account from tenants so I keep an eye on those).

[johnny847]

Instead of checking my accounts I just set up email alerts any time a transaction occurs on my account. I then set Gmail to filter most these to skip the inbox (so I'm not interrupted throughout the day). I usually check these emails once a day, sometimes once every other day.

Considering I have over 20 credit cards and 10 bank accounts, there's no way I could log into each one of them every day
...
without driving myself crazy.

Have you checked lately?
1 credit card, 1 bank account.
Although I do have a Vanguard, Scottrade, a seperate HSA account,
hmm... maybe I'm 4/10 of the way to crazy.

No.

I mean like I said I check those email notifications daily, but I don't log into the accounts daily. In theory I have email notifications set up for any activity on all my accounts so I am effectively checking my accounts daily.

[Nemesis.]

I'm in the middle of moving some accounts to Vanguard and part of that includes liquidating certain funds so I'm checking almost daily right now.
Normally it would still be a couple times a week.
My real weakness is checking my stock ticker app several times a day when I'm bored at work.
I'm bored at work a lot...

[muckety_muck]

Checking account - probably once a week. All other accounts are checked at the end of the month to calculate net worth.