The total fees was only about $65 - 80. Out of 10 checks, only 4 places imposed a returned check fee at all and one of them waived it.
The three that didn’t:
Gas company
Water company
Trash collection
The water company has been the worst. They sent a letter saying I was past due $33 and owed $10 for the late fee. I called and questioned how I was “past due” on the account when the only balance is a returned check fee. (Once I realized the checks wouldn’t clear, I paid everything online/over the phone before the due date.)
She waived the $10 late fee and said the $33 would be attached to the next bill. Okay. Two days later I got a shut-off notice in the mail. I thought it was just timing. A few days later I got a shut-off notice on my door. I called again. I was told there was a memo on the account that it won’t get shut off and the $33 will be attached to the next bill. I’m told, “We can’t stop the shut-off notices from coming, but you can ignore the.” Okay…
I got home today from a weekend away. There was a “sorry we missed you” notice about a certified letter from the water company. The notices are kind of hard to ignore. Perhaps I’ll stop by there tomorrow after work.
How much are they going to spend trying to collect their $33 fee for a returned check? It just seems like it would make more sense for them to waive the fee, put an end to the notices, or tell me I need to pay it immediately.
Check printing companies don’t have any legal standing whether they are printing actual checks for you or birthday invitations for a relative. You can print your own at home with cheap software and there is probably a web site that lets you plug the information in and print them on the fly. If you run out again, just make some yourself. Any check with your name and account number printed on a piece of paper is valid. Cecil did a column that described how virtually anything that has that information on it is a valid check. I have read some about U.S. check case law and it is both precise and generous about what is valid and what is not.
My beef with Checks Unlimited had to do with their exorbitant re-order prices. When I came to the second to last packet of checks, there was a reorder form, with prices. I decided to reorder and called them. They took the necessary information and told me I’d have to physically mail in a check, blah blah blah…and then they told me the price.
It was something ridiculous like $75. I said, “Woah, wait a minute. The order form says it’s $12.95 a box.”
The CSR said, “That’s only for new orders.”
“New orders? It was ATTACHED to my current packet of checks. You know, the checks YOU printed.”
The CSR wouldn’t budge. So after 15 minutes on the phone with the guy, I told him to cancel the order. He hung up on me.
I ended up ordering them from Costco for $7.99/box. They’re not as pretty as the ones I got from the mail order companies, but it was a hell of a lot cheaper.
P.S. My brother-in-law’s aunt was robbed of a small fortune when thieves stole one box of checks from her mail order. This is one of the occasions where it might be worthwhile to pay for Express Mail.
What is “valid” and what a merchant is required to accept are two completely different things. While it may be completely legal and valid to write a check on the side of a barn door, good luck getting your local Safeway to accept that as payment for your groceries.
I work as a payment processor - if I saw cheques like that, it would probably make my day.
While we’re talking about cheques, I’d like to remind people that the year is 2008, the written and numerical amounts of your cheque must match, you must sign your cheque, and for the love of all that’s holy in this world and the next, put your account number on your payment somewhere, especially if you write cheques for your personal utilities from your company account and you have an illegible signature.
Safeway doesn’t have to accept them because you haven’t incurred any debts to them. They can kick you out of the store for any reason they want including insisting that you want to pay them in an odd method of payment that they don’t want to take.
Your electric company, gas company, and credit card bills are real debts. They have to take them because you offered valid payment under checking laws. Places that say they won’t take $100 bills are the exact same thing. Stores can refuse to allow it but it has to be taken when offered to a credit card agency or something like child support.
That’s all true, but you also need to have the special coded numbers on the bottom of the cheque for processing centres to be able to process the cheques. I’ve sent back more than one cheque because those numbers were missing and the bank wouldn’t process them.