just Lu: Housewife MacGyver: FREE Printable Custom Checkbook Register

I hope you have enjoyed this month as much as I have! A huge thanks to all of our fantastic guests:

Emily from Bloom (read her Budgeting Basics post here)
Cathy from Fiscally Chic (read her Home Buying Finance post here)
Stephanie from Couponing 101 (read her interview and site feature here)
Amy from A Savvy Life and Savvy Shopper Deals (read her savvy shopping post here)

To wrap up March's MacGyvering our finances (since it's now April -- eek! where did the time go? with a simultaneous hooray! spring is here even if there is SNOW here today!), I have simple little printable for you: a custom checkbook register.

In an effort to better track our finances (both this month and EVERY month since this is an effort I find myself starting over again and again....), I decided that I'd like a checkbook register that wasn't *just* for my checking account, but for the main accounts that I spend from. In our household, this is just two accounts: our checking account and our credit card account.

To track the spending for those two accounts in one place, our register has columns for both our check/debit purchases (or deposits) and total balance, and for our credit card purchases (and payments) and total balance so that we can easily see how much we've spent immediately via our debit card, and how much we've spent later with our credit card. :)

(scroll down for the full download)

(In case you are worried about my financial dumbness, we don't EVER carry a balance on our credit card. Because we don't spend more than we make. But it's still nice to know that I can buy such-and-such right now and pay for it with the next paycheck instead of the current paycheck. :)

So, to finish out MacGyvering our finances, you can download and print the same checkbook register that I use, or a blank version to fill in with your own accounts and preferences.

The printable is available both for traditional letter-size paper and legal-size paper -- only one double-sided page will fit on the letter-size paper and that is SO not a MacGyver thing to do, so that's why the legal-size option, too. :)

Download...

letter-size checkbook register (one per page)

BLANK letter-size checkbook register (one per page)

legal-size checkbook register (two per page)

BLANK legal-size checkbook register (two per page)

Just print up (and trim) as many pages as you'd like in your register, then fold in half and staple. The finished, folded book measures 5.5" wide by 2.75" tall (or a little bigger depending on your trimming margins).

Enjoy!