I don’t use my bank’s online bill paying service precisely because they take the money out right away. This is also why when I’m in a store that takes paper checks I’ll happily write one instead of using a debit or atm card. I want my account balance to stay as high as possible for as long as possible so that I can earn more interest. Which isn’t a tremendous amount, but it adds up.
It is a pain to keep track of checks that have been outstanding for a long time which to me is over a month. I once had a pizza place keep a check for 8 months before cashing. Even though I do balance my checkbook regularly, it was a relatively small amount (<$20) so after a while I didn’t notice the extra money. And then they happened to cash it when I had no money in the bank. Ugh - boy was that a pain. It’s easy to keep in mind that you have an extra couple hundred, but the smaller amounts can easily get “lost”.
If the check wasn’t cashed, you still had the amount of the check in your account. If you had no money in your account, then your arithmetic was wrong.
Well obviously my arithmetic was wrong since the check bounced. I didn’t say I was faultless, I said small check amounts were harder to keep track of over the long term since they don’t stand out as much.
Correspondingly, it’s a pain when someone writes me a check for a piddling amount, usually leading me to take over a month to cash it. So I think it works out well. They get back some of the pain they give me.
Yeah I get that. Recently my aunt wrote me a check for $25 as a roundabout way to get some money to her son (my cousin) who happens to live near me. It took me a couple weeks to get to the bank to deposit (after I’d already made a withdrawal and given him the cash) because it just wasn’t big enough to warrant a special trip. (Only because I have a very small bank and of the two branches closest to me one is an hour round-trip and the other is a stress filled escapade into the city on my short lunch break and that branch isn’t open on Saturdays. :rolleyes: ) Generally, except for very odd circumstances, I don’t write checks to individuals, only businesses who typically make bank deposits every day so it was very odd that my check took 8 months to go through. And this was large national pizza chain so I’m quite sure they did deposits everyday. Maybe my check fell behind a drawer or something. drachillix, that’s still 90 days you’re not making any money off of that cash sitting in your account though. This has only happened to me once in all the time I’ve used a checking acct and I’ve been a lot more careful since then! There was a thread recently where someone said they checked their acct online a couple times a day, well I check mine at least once a week just to balance my checkbook and make sure I don’t have to pay any banking fees. Except to buy checks of course, which works out to be @10 cent per check instead of the $1 my bank charges for POS debits. The bank pays a good interest rate on checking & savings accounts (with just $50 minimum balance & no fees on the acct) though so as long as I can avoid paying anymore bounced check fees I’m golden and making a couple dollars off of the bank. It isn’t a ton of money (about $40 per year checking & savings interest combined) but I’m poor enough to want every extra bit of money I can get.
What with debit cards and online banking it’s become more difficult to properly maintain a paper checkbook register. Looking it up online to know what your “real balance” is – that’s pointless, because you still have to subtract outstanding checks. We recently had a largish check on our account that was outstanding for about 16 days. It’s very aggravating. We do always try to use money orders when it’s the only alternative to an online payment, or giving cash to somebody, but sometimes it’s just not possible.
In the past, I’ve tried carrying an actual checkbook with me, just so I could put everything down in the register. But I’m a guy…I don’t carry a European Carry All ™ nor do I usually wear a jacket, so I haven’t got any good pocket to carry the damn thing in. Those things are too big to fit comfortably in a pants pocket.
I’m with those who say it is difficult to keep track if cheques are outstanding for a long time. My husband and I are quite good at keeping track of our finances (in three bank accounts, with multiple automatic withdrawal payments and automatic deposits), and if a cheque is outstanding for a long time, chances are good we’ll forget about it, too. There really isn’t any easy method of keeping track of an outstanding cheque, except putting a sticky note on the computer or something - we have no bank books for any of our three accounts (which is the norm in Canada - we’re an electronic banking society, baby). We do have a chequebook register, but we are out of the habit of using it for the three cheques we write each year, and it wouldn’t help us much when we take our bank card and go do our electronic banking like we always do.
Ronin, like someone else mentioned, try to get her bank info to deposit cheques right into her account. Anybody can deposit into any account; it’s the withdrawals that get a little trickier.
I can tell just by reading who knows how to reconcile a checking account on a monthly basis and who doesn’t. It’s not that hard, but if you’re doing your checkwriting by the seat of your pants…well expect the stories that you read on this thread. As a business owner, it is important for me to stay on top of my accounts, especially checking. I also wrote my own excel program that mimics a checkbook register exactly plus does the necessary addition and subtraction line by line so I know what my account balance is, check by check. If there is a way to download my program to you guys, show me where to go and I’ll be more than happy to give it to you. Use the monthly statement backside to do the reconciliation…that’s it.
Also, when a check goes uncashed for 90+ days, I usually call that and find out what the deal is…lost, stolen, or plain lazy and act accordingly (stop payment and reissue or tell them to get their butt to the bank before it becomes uncashable)…that is what the OP should be doing with their landlord.
We know how to reconcile our chequing accounts very well, thank you, and balance them to the statements each month. It’s one of those trade-off things for us; is the time spent chasing after outstanding cheques worth the effort? No. Most people will cash a cheque in a timely fashion; that’s what our system is predicated on. The occasional irritation who doesn’t cash the cheque in a timely way is a (small) gamble we’re willing to take to not spend inordinate amounts of time tracking a small amount of cheques. In four years of banking this way, we have yet to bounce a cheque, so our system seems to be working quite well for us.
Of course, if we were in business, we would also be tracking our cheques and invoices relentlessly. To do otherwise would be irresponsible.
I use Microsoft Money to keep track but there are lots of easy programs out there that help balance your accounts for you, my husband had one on his palm pilot for a while too. I use debit cards for everything and just save the receipts, then once a week I pop them in with any checks and I use that balance to tell me how much I have left. I never go by what the bank balance says I have because who knows how many debits or checks are waiting to clear? I guess if I only wrote one check a month or something I would go by what the bank balance says, but I debit too often to use it at all, 95% of the time I would say my bank balance shows more money than what I can spend because there are outstanding checks or debits out there.
Once a month I reconcile with the bank statement just to make sure nothing has happened with my account that I don’t know about like a fee or bank error.
I agree that people should cash a check within 30 days though, if just as a courtesy. (What bank to some of you have that you earn interest on your checking account? Is that normal?)
