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Trevor Sadowski
Trevor Sadowski is a qualified accountant with over 20 years experience. To read more free information about practical accountancy issues please visit his site on
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Just going through my bank statements the other day and was glad I did. Do you know there used to be a time when you could trust banks! Not any more, honestly you have to check everything nowadays, they seem to be prone to errors as much as anyone else.
My own particular problem was one where they were charging me for a foreign transaction I never made! The problem is they are getting away with these errors in many cases because people simply don't check their statements - they assume the bank is always right - well I'm here to tell you this is a dangerous assumption!
What you need to do is to create a list of transactions which regularly go through your account every month. Whilst you are doing this why not take the opportunity to review all those automatic payments going out. Do you really need to subscribe to that mag? Why not cancel it and replace it with a payment to some kind of monthly savings scheme or stock market investment fund? You don't miss the money at the moment and over time this could build into a nice little reserve fund.
Using the list you can predict the balance on your account at say, the end of the month. I typically do this just after my salary has been paid in so I can plan what my monthly outgoings are going to be and see whether I can afford to save some more money or (hopefully not!) need to transfer some money in from my savings account.
If you want to get really clever with this why not create a cash book that records all the trasnactions going through your account. You can do this fairly easily on Excel. I promise you you will be really surprised at how much money you waste on useless items!
Published by Trevor Sadowski on December 4, 2005 12:09 PM
