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> Right, but for anyone who has to keep a close eye on their balance (so excluding most HNers)... Keeping a close eye on your balance is basic financial respon

> Right, but for anyone who has to keep a close eye on their balance (so excluding most HNers)... Keeping a close eye on your balance is basic financial responsibility and maintaining situational awareness against the ever looming threat of fraud. It doesn't matter if you operate on a bank account with $10 or $100,000...if you're not actively accounting for your transactions, that's a personal flaw. The way how I see it: if you don't have the discipline to properly account for even the smallest expenses, you'll never be able to sustain wealth at any significant level. Anecdotally, a recurring pet peeve encountered is when I'm not provided with a receipt for purchases by default. This happens more often than not at fast food joints and gas stations, and when kindly asked for one, I almost always receive a reaction of either dubious entitlement or disgusted inconvenience, highly correlated to which car I happened to take that day. Although this class of expense is in the noise with respect to my financial posture, I still track them with unwaivering vigilance and find it so ironic when a minimum wage cashier who probably struggles to make ends meet every week disrespects that little piece of paper which enables personal accountability. Stochastically speaking, many of us--including myself--come from humble beginnings.

dahdum 7y ago
Why do you need the receipt itself for fast food or gas? I categorize transactions once a month based on the statements, if something looked crazy I’d dispute it (never has). I do take photos of larger dining receipts, since errors can be made entering the tip after I’ve left. Usually anything over $75 I’ll take a photo. Seems unnecessary to me to spend much time on the noise since I can see in aggregate if some behavior like eating out is problematic.
- kortilla 7y ago
  As long as you don’t mind being stolen from, sure. Things I’ve witnessed on my account that are difficult to catch weeks after the fact: - tip added to receipt when I didn’t leave one - tip increased by $10 - tip entered as total amount - entire amount charged twice - credit card number stolen and used at another fast food chain location for one I sometimes visit
  - aliceryhl 7y ago
    I don't know how it works in the US, but here in Europe we can see the amount we were billed on the card terminal and the shop isn't just able to go change it after the fact.
    - valleyer 7y ago
      In the US, the terminal is not brought to the table. The tip amount is written on a paper receipt and entered by the clerk at a (usually) out-of-sight terminal, usually after you've left. A customer doesn't interact with a terminal at all.
      - lol768 7y ago
        This is one of the (many!) problems with how financial technology works in the US. Cards get an auth placed twice for the same bill (one without tip, one with tip), there's little to no card-based security in place when making purchases and customers don't get to hear about their transactions until many days have passed since the purchase.
        squiggleblaz 7y ago
        Every time one of these discussions comes up, it always seems shocking how bad bank/card mediated transactions are in the US. It's as if you just give your open wallet to anyone. I've just moved to Europe and it feels like I've gone back in time a decade. I can't imagine what it must be like in the US.
  - dahdum 7y ago
    I take photos of receipts to protect against those scenarios, I just don’t cross reference them unless something looks “off” when I categorize monthly. I suppose I could have fallen victim a few times on tiny amounts never knowing, but in total couldn’t be more than $100 over the past several years. I also tip pretty well on smaller bills, so that probably reduces my exposure a bit. I respect the discipline it takes to audit everything, but for me it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
jjoonathan 7y ago
Accounting for your transactions and watching a tight balance are two entirely separate activities, as different as day and night. One involves checking a list / notifications for fraud and the occasional exercise of self-control to stay within a reasonable budget. Easy peasy. The other involves frequent constraint solving and optimization, which explode in complexity as budgets get tighter and constraints get harder. The latency built into modern tooling exacerbates the issue. Credit card apps, mint, etc are decent for accounting (or allow export to an app that is), but they are so bad for dealing with a tight budget that people resort to debit cards and hand-ledgers (under which I am including manual entry of amounts into an app). A sizable safety margin lets you tolerate latency and gives you access to modern, low-overhead, highly capable tooling. Also, the luxury of choosing your own budgets lets you dodge tons of constraint solving right off the bat. > Stochastically speaking, many of us--including myself--come from humble beginnings. Then surely you remember the massive cognitive unloading that came when you first built a safety margin, yes? Even putting all of the above aside, I just don't have much faith in patronizing and finger-wagging as tools for social progress. Even if responsibly consuming credit were trivial at all income levels, I still would still object to business models that encouraged and monetized irresponsibility.

dahdum 7y ago

Why do you need the receipt itself for fast food or gas? I categorize transactions once a month based on the statements, if something looked crazy I’d dispute it (never has). I do take photos of larger dining receipts, since errors can be made entering the tip after I’ve left. Usually anything over $75 I’ll take a photo. Seems unnecessary to me to spend much time on the noise since I can see in aggregate if some behavior like eating out is problematic.

kortilla 7y ago
As long as you don’t mind being stolen from, sure. Things I’ve witnessed on my account that are difficult to catch weeks after the fact: - tip added to receipt when I didn’t leave one - tip increased by $10 - tip entered as total amount - entire amount charged twice - credit card number stolen and used at another fast food chain location for one I sometimes visit
- aliceryhl 7y ago
  I don't know how it works in the US, but here in Europe we can see the amount we were billed on the card terminal and the shop isn't just able to go change it after the fact.
  - valleyer 7y ago
    In the US, the terminal is not brought to the table. The tip amount is written on a paper receipt and entered by the clerk at a (usually) out-of-sight terminal, usually after you've left. A customer doesn't interact with a terminal at all.
    - lol768 7y ago
      This is one of the (many!) problems with how financial technology works in the US. Cards get an auth placed twice for the same bill (one without tip, one with tip), there's little to no card-based security in place when making purchases and customers don't get to hear about their transactions until many days have passed since the purchase.
      - squiggleblaz 7y ago
        Every time one of these discussions comes up, it always seems shocking how bad bank/card mediated transactions are in the US. It's as if you just give your open wallet to anyone. I've just moved to Europe and it feels like I've gone back in time a decade. I can't imagine what it must be like in the US.
- dahdum 7y ago
  I take photos of receipts to protect against those scenarios, I just don’t cross reference them unless something looks “off” when I categorize monthly. I suppose I could have fallen victim a few times on tiny amounts never knowing, but in total couldn’t be more than $100 over the past several years. I also tip pretty well on smaller bills, so that probably reduces my exposure a bit. I respect the discipline it takes to audit everything, but for me it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

jjoonathan 7y ago

Accounting for your transactions and watching a tight balance are two entirely separate activities, as different as day and night. One involves checking a list / notifications for fraud and the occasional exercise of self-control to stay within a reasonable budget. Easy peasy. The other involves frequent constraint solving and optimization, which explode in complexity as budgets get tighter and constraints get harder. The latency built into modern tooling exacerbates the issue. Credit card apps, mint, etc are decent for accounting (or allow export to an app that is), but they are so bad for dealing with a tight budget that people resort to debit cards and hand-ledgers (under which I am including manual entry of amounts into an app). A sizable safety margin lets you tolerate latency and gives you access to modern, low-overhead, highly capable tooling. Also, the luxury of choosing your own budgets lets you dodge tons of constraint solving right off the bat. > Stochastically speaking, many of us--including myself--come from humble beginnings. Then surely you remember the massive cognitive unloading that came when you first built a safety margin, yes? Even putting all of the above aside, I just don't have much faith in patronizing and finger-wagging as tools for social progress. Even if responsibly consuming credit were trivial at all income levels, I still would still object to business models that encouraged and monetized irresponsibility.