Okay, due to a fax machine error that caused my checking account information to be compromised, my checking account was closed and they immediately began opening me a new one. By immediately, I mean it takes at least 7-10 days before you can hope to have access to it via check or debit card. No problem, right? I will just withdraw a bunch of cash and make all of my payments that way.
Wow, cash sure does suck. My landlord doesn’t accept cash (and I wouldn’t feel comfortable paying for something so expensive in cash anyhow) and to be able to mail in payments for electricity and credit card bills and such, you need checks. I brought my mom cash and she wrote out checks for those things, but I had really forgotten the horrors of waiting for 10 minutes in line to prepay at the gas station behind the group of guys all buying 40 ounce bottles of beer and bbq sunflower seeds. I had forgotten how much it sucks to have to do the math in your head before you check out at the grocery store to make sure the 15 year old they hired doesn’t mess up your change. I feel weird knowing that if I lost my purse I couldn’t just call my bank, visa and discover and cancel my cards to know that my funds were safe since all of my funds are now in my purse. I, for one, welcome our new plastic overlords.
So tell me, are there things in your life that you hadn’t really thought about that cause you pain and anguish in the night (or any other time of day, really)?
“checks”, “mail in”, “prepay” - I feel like I am The Lake House and you are living in some distant past. I have not owned a check book since last century and have not mailed a payment to anyone for about as long. If we prepay for fuel we do it at the bowser.
Heh. I have most of my bills set up as autopay from my checking account, but I don’t have a debit card. I pay for everything all the time in cash. Helps me keep a spending limit that plastic dosen’t.
I do still write the occasional cheque, although a quick look at my chequebook shows that I’ve written only two in the last 18 months. Otherwise I pay all bills electronically.
Exactly my point! I don’t want to have to prepay for gas, I don’t want to have to mail in a check if I have the option to pay electronically, I wan’t to have a working account number so I can pay for things online again. I want to be able to use my check card for all my minor purchases. I want to be able to phone in my discover card payment! I cannot wait until I never have to see another dollar bill again, just numbers on a screen from my bank account. I don’t like living in The Lake House, dammit! I will do a dance right there in front of the mailbox when they send me notice that my new account is active.
Though I have to admit, I do like having checks. They make it easier to pay for things that don’t accept credit. They also make it easier to pay for things like my credit card balances since they are never the same from month to month so an automatic payment really doesn’t work there.
In Spain, most stuff is paid for electronically. For example, the contract for my lease gave me the account number for my landlord: after signing it, I went to my bank, set up a “permanent transfer” by which they would transfer the monthly rent to the landlord every month on the workday closest and previous to the 5th of the month, transfered the safety deposit.
I went to the electric company’s offices to get the bill changed to my name. I brought the contract (which said electric bill would be “mine”); I filled in a piece of paper authorizing the electric company to charge me through the bank, every month on the 10th.
School, car payments, loans, everything is paid electronically or in cash.
Then I get to the US and everything is checks, checks, checks! People look at me like I’m an alien from outer space, not simply an alien from across the ocean, when I mention automatic payments. I got a checkbook for the first time in my life. Until then I’d seen only two checks in my whole life: my parents had to do some big payment, so they drew their checkbook from the depths of the safe box and wrote a check.
After I’d been there for a while, someone explained to me that I should “balance my checkbook when I got my bank statements”. It took me a while to understand what the heck where they talking about, then a longer while to stop giggling. My bank accounts are always balanced, thanks - even on periods when I don’t bother tracking things on paper, I can tell you how much I have in the bank to within 10€/$ (when I track, it’s exact to the cent).
Plastic is all well and good - except that I get hit for a 2% “surcharge” when I try to use one here in India. It’s ridiculous, and stupid, and prevents the growth of a plastic culture (frankly, I’m all for not having to carry bundles of cash when buying expensive things) but that’s the way it is. When the 2% is too small to matter, it’s plastic. There are times, though (like when I bought a computer) that the amount made paying in cash worthwhile. Until they change that… no universal plastic. Oh, and most places have a minimum charge on cards, too. Double whammy - spend more, spend more in surcharges.
How does it work if you share a rented residence among several flatmates/housemates/etc? If you agree to split the rent evenly, does the landlord just debit everyone’s account by the same amount every month?
In my current residence, the rent is split evenly but then adjusted to take into account the discrepancies among how much we each paid for the previous month’s utilities. One of my housemates is responsible for the water and electricity, I’m responsible for cable and internet, a third housemate pays for gas, and all of those bills are different sizes each month. We work it out so that every month the landlord gets checks that in aggregate cover the monthly rent, but the figures for individual checks vary from month to month. I think it’s a workable system that fits well with the U.S. check-centric payment method, but in Europe I’d imagine a different system arising under shared living conditions. For example, the landlord pays all utilities electronically and each flatmate/housemate/etc. pays the landlord electronically.
There’s no “in europe”. Each european country has its own idiosyncrasies. If ** Nava ** is representative, french people use cheques much more often than spaniards. At the contrary, using a cheque seems to be mostly unheard of in Germany, and apparently they aren’t even accepted for payment in most cases. But Germans will use cash for ludicrously high amounts (by other countries’ standarts). French people rarely have credit cards, and use debit cards instead. And so on…
It drives me nuts that I have to send in a check to pay for my parking space every. stupid. month. They don’t even send me a bill to remind me! “Oh, we’re a small company, we can’t do automatic debits.” Well, they own a lot more than my parking lot, and that thing is a damned license to print money - why on earth do I have to send a stupid check?
Also, when you get a cat from the animal shelter here, evidently you need cash or check. Also, when you pay individuals, like some guy who cuts your grass or whatever. And sometimes you’re encouraged to pay with a check so you can track it - for example, when you pay off one of those “no interest for two years!” things, where you want to be able to point to the cancelled checks if they try to screw you over.
I suspect the Spanish system is similar to what exists in Australia. No, the landlord cannot debit everyone’s account, because there’s too much chance of abuse. The landlord tells the tenants what account to send the money to, and the tenants then tell their bank to send the rent money to the landlord’s account. So you can send money to other people’s accounts, but you can’t take it from their accounts: all you should do is send them an invoice or monthly account reminding them what is owed, and leave it up to them to send the money.
I can answer this, since it seems South Africa works in a very similar way to Spain.
I think it is important to note in the rent example, it is you (and your bank) that is pushing the money, not the landlord pulling it. It looks like Nava told her bank to automatically send the cash every month.
In my case, I manually transfered R4000 into my landlord’s account every month through internet banking. My flatmate transfered R2000 into my bank account every month through internet banking.
Here in the US I pay my rent with a check (I hate this!) but I use the website of each individual company to authorize an electronic payment every month. In SA I would have set up the debit order for cellular phone payments, car payments, etc. Here I prefer the US website approach, since I feel more in control, but I really wish it were easier to transfer money between two people’s bank accounts.
I have my Discover Card set up to automatically deduct the entire payment from my checking account each month. If I have any other CC bills that month I pay them through that CC’s website.
The petrol pump at a petrol station, which dispenses petrol and displays the price, amount dispensed, and so on.
Many of them now have “EFTPOS At Pump” facilities built into them so you don’t need to go into the shop to pay for your fuel, and I’m told in some places (parts of Melbourne and Sydney?) you have to prepay for your petrol after dark.
Up here in Queensland, however, you generally fill the tank first THEN go into the shop and pay for it.
As for the electronic transfer thing, Giles is right on the money (excuse the pun)- the tenants can each send their share of the rent money from their account to the landlord’s account, but the Landlord can’t go into their account and just take it. There needs to be an authority form signed for Direct Debit transfers out of your account, but anyone can put money into it, if that makes sense.
The beauty of the system is that I can have my pay direct deposited into my bank account by my employer, and the rent payments automatically come out and go to the landlord’s account without me having to lift a finger or do anything.
Much less hassle than writing cheques or using phone banking!
You can set most bills up to be paid by Direct Debit, too, if you’re that way inclined…
Oh, we have that here, we just call it the pump, as in “pay at the pump”. You have to go way out into the boondocks (I believe you call that the “woop woop”?) to find one where you can’t pay at the pump. Just credit cards or debit cards, though, not cash or anything. Still have to go in for that.
Generally speaking, I pay two checks a month: one for rent and one for Visa. (Twice a year is a check for auto insurance. One of my guild memberships is annual). Electric and phone are automatically paid from my bank account. I’ve been paying the maximum on my credit card and then paying current expenses with plastic. I’ve decided to take out enough cash for the things which absolutely have to be paid with cash and pay the rest to Visa.
The remaining two routine items I have to set aside cash for?
Laundrymat $20 every two weeks
Movies out: $20 each time if I’m getting my usual refreshments
So about $140 in cash gets set aside and other than that, it’s plastic all the way.
