And whats to stop them from crediting the wrong account when you mail them a check?
2 Likes
To start this off, Iâd better say that Iâm from Northern Europe.
I know my parents used cheques sometime in the late 70âs - early 80âs, but as long as Iâve known they (as well as I) have used either a giro transfer (which apparently is something that not everyone has - the more one learns every day) or some sort of electronic billing method - weâve had internet banking since mid-to-late 1990âs.
Edit: From my point of view, sending a cheque to someone seems terribly unsafe - after all, mail can get lost, etc, thus delaying the payment and possibly causing problems. With a bank transfer you have incontrovertible proof that youâve paid something to a particular account at a particular time.
4 Likes
If you missed two paychecks then I guess youâre not balancing and reconciling your register when you receive each monthly statement?
I pay my local personal property taxes with a check because they charge an additional fee to pay electronically. Itâs not that much, but I am cheap. I didnât think this was legal (charging more for credit cards) but no way am I making a ruckus with the county government over it.
1 Like
Ah. Checkbooks. I remember when I got my first checkbook about 24 years ago. When I wrote the final check from that checkbook, about ten years later, the cashier didnât even know what it was, and he had to ask his boss if they accepted it as a payment.
To be honest, though, I only wrote checks when I knew I didnât have any money in my accont.
Student societies at British universities seem to run largely on cheques, because of the hard-copy record keeping and traceability. Some also have their bank accounts set up to require two signatories (e.g. president and treasurer) on each cheque,
I receive checks from my tenants, property manager and grandmother on my birthday and holidays. I write checks to tradespeople (who in my experience only accept cash or checks), tenants for deposit refunds and local governments. My bank writes the rest of my checks for payments to places that donât accept electronic payments. I think this might be lost on a lot of the people who donât think theyâre still using checks. If you pay bills using your online banking, chances are that some of those payments are still paper checks that the bank is mailing on your behalf. You might not be writing the check, but youâre still using checks to send money around.
1 Like
Man, Iâm nearly 50 and I think I wrote like two cheques in my life. What a quaint little experience that was.
Why would you let them charge your credit card, but not your account? The only reason I use a credit card (apart from international purchases and travels, of course) is because I get some cash back from Amazon that way.
Disputing a charge takes a call, not that it really happens. Only once when a telephone carrier forgot that the contract didnât come into effect. They charged me six months or and I disputed every time by a simple call to my bank. Yes, I couldâve simply told the carrier, but was peeved at that time. When they wrote a letter asking why I used their services but didnât want to
pay, I gently reminded them that they didnât have any contract and where practically involved in fraud. Their charges stopped at once.
Anyway, I can see why people with an incredibly tight budget would need to control every payment manually and even need the time between sending the cheque and having the other party cashing it. But if one has a regular and normal income, leaving things on autopay or autochare should be no problem at all.
Or even daily. Having had bad habits a couple if decades ago, I check my accounts daily and every transaction on my main account triggers a text message, telling me the charge and how much money is in that account.
The only stuff I have to track manually are cash payments and iTunes payments.
2 Likes
Americans with kids in school probably account for the majority of non-utility-bill checkwriting. Seems like everything the school needs money for has to be cash or check - school photos, field-trips, yearbook, PTA dues, fundraisersâŚ
I would disagree that checkwriting is dead, and instead say it is severely marginalized. It will be dead someday, of course, as will cash a number of years later.
1 Like
American tradespeople, I assume.
Over here itâs cash, when they work on the side.
Otherwise, you get a bill, which gets paid by giro transfer (usually online) or they bring a terminal in which you can pay electronically by authorizing them to charge your account for that amount.
Well, theyâll take cash, but theyâll grumble.
1 Like
Cheque and using the imperial system is what distinguishes Americans from the rest of the world. 
1 Like
Once check fraud got so prevalent that writing a check at the grocery store turned into a major hassle, that was the end of it for me. That was at least 20 years ago.
I know people like to pretend theyâre somehow more secure or safe, but theyâre processed exactly like an electronic payment these days, with the same opportunities for error (plus OCR/transcription errors of the account or amount).
All this time I thought it was eagles, fireworks and obesity.
Nah, we had an eagle standard before your continent was discovered by Europeans and we are gaining on obesity.
Yeah, thatâs a pretty bad summary of the actual article, not to mention reality. Thereâs a chart there showing tens of billions of check transactions in 2012. Declining, in a linear fashion, but still⌠billions.
Over and above the fact that framing it this way sounds a little bit like sniffing, âugh, who even uses dial-up anymoreâ or âpff, sheâs so poor she still has a CRT TV set,â itâs not even a poverty issue yet. I make a middle-class income and I live in a town with many different banks and credit unions. My mortgage is at one bank, and my checking account is at another. There is exactly no way besides writing myself a check, using any locally available establishment, for me to transfer money into the checking account from which the mortgage is drawn. (Possibly thereâd be a way to do it online with a wire transfer, but that would cost money.)
Itâs annoying to have to ferry a piece of paper to the bank every month, and Iâd be perfectly happy to go checkless if I could effortlessly zap money around for free, but I canât. To be honest, not only are checks not dead, I suspect theyâll outlive me.
Iâll keep that in mind as I fill in my hand made silk screened hemp paper checks with ink from an Amazonian indigenous womenâs art cooperative using my retro Italian fountain pen.
2 Likes
Your tenants and property manager give you money gifts on your birthday and holidays? Lucky!!
(Yes, I know what you meant. But it was funny to read.)
1 Like
Wait, thatâs it? Because I can think of a long list of other things we do very differently than the rest of the civilized world.
While living in Norway I found that my landlord would only take bank transfer for rent, but none of my US banks would do the transfer without a hefty fee. I finally paid monthly rent by collecting cash from the ATM (over several days, because of withdrawal limits), then paying by cash with the giro at the post office.
