When I used to use online bill payment to pay for my child care, that’s exactly what happened: the bank wrote and mailed a check on my behalf. That’s because the childcare wasn’t set up to accept electronic payment.
In fact on one occasion this check was lost. The bank debited my account but it was never received. After I complained the bank credited it back to me and I hand-wrote a replacement check.
To answer the OP, I write two or three checks a month. At least two every month to pay my house cleaners – they expect a check personally delivered into their hands. And then about every other month there’s another check for a charity or some random one-time bill that I don’t want to bother setting up electronic bill-pay for.
I write lots of checks. I’ve been writing weekly checks to our two babysitters over the summer. Lots of school stuff and kids’ activities is most conveniently handled by check. For example, the fee for a field trip might be $8.15. I can send in cash or a check, but if I don’t have exact change and send a $10 bill, they’ll keep the additional $1.85. It’s easier to write the check.
For those of you who never write checks, how do you pay other individuals? Like the babysitter? Do you keep a pile of cash around all the time?
I’m in business: and every invoice I send out includes my bank account so that people can pay me directly. Almost every other (legal) business, even small one s like baby sitters, do the same thing. Once someone’s bank account number is loaded into my account I simply have to click the name, enter the amount to pay, confirm and click send.
When you say babysitter, do you mean something more like a day-care center or do you mean Janie down the street who sits for you once in a while on Friday or Saturday night ? Because I can see the daycare center giving you those details- Janie ,not so much.
I write more checks that a lot of people in this thread, but nearly all of them are to individuals. There are birthday and Christmas and wedding gifts, the monthly rent for the garage I rent from one of my neighbors, payments to the dentist and when a group of friends or relatives are doing something jointly ( all the siblings chipping in for a gift to our mother, or one person making the arrangements and payments for a group trip). I could use my bank’s bill pay for those, but then I can’t pay the dentist at the time of the appointment , there’s nothing for me to put in the birthday/Christmas/wedding card and Janie won’t get paid until a few days after she babysits ( as I wouldn’t set up the bill payment before she babysits).
And you can’t always count on knowing about the need for cash in advance- I don’t know how many times my kids didn’t tell me until the morning that they needed payment for a field trip or tickets to something at school that same day
See, this is the thing where U.S. banks are definitely behind the times. They are just starting to make it possible to directly pay into another person’s peronsal bank account. Not every bank has this capability yet.
…nope. I mean “Janie down the road”, if of course I had kids that needed babysitting and if I actually knew a Janie. What I’m trying to get across is that “hey can you give me your bank account number so I can throw some money in it” is a perfectly normal process in New Zealand, in Australia and apparently across most of Europe.
That won’t be a perfectly normal process in the US in my lifetime. Not because of the banks, though. Lots of people don’t want to give out their personal banking information to individual people who are paying them, and if they won’t give me the account number , I’m either paying cash, sending a check or I can go into bill pay on my bank’s website and the bank sends the check. Actual businesses with business accounts providing account numbers for payment might happen in my lifetime, but I would just about drop dead if my garage landlord gave me his account info so I could just deposit the rent. He wants a check (which gives him my info- but he doesn’t mind having mine) or cash.
I need to reorder. It took me long enough to go through this last book, though, that the calendar goes through 2008 and the bank in the imprint no longer exists. I pretty much only write checks for the rent, but occasionally I find it a better method of payment than debit or credit even when I have that option.
But every cheque you write has your account info on it, and every cheque that the person you are paying writes has their account info on it. Account info is being thrown around all over the place. Account information lets you deposit money into someone’s account, it does not, without other maliciousness, let anyone withdraw money from your account.
I have never had to write a cheque to an individual in my life, I have always been able to directly transfer funds between banks.
Edit: I don’t disagree that the USA may be very slow to adopt, but there is no good reason for the reluctance.
“He wants a check (which gives him my info- but he doesn’t mind having mine) or cash.” Paying my garage landlord by check is more convenient for me than paying by cash , and I have to give him my account number to have that convenience. But giving me his account number for me to directly transfer into it wouldn’t necessarily add to his convenience- he might keep my cash payment around to have cash on hand, or need to go to the bank anyway with payments from other tenants.
We still write a surprisingly large number. I just pulled up Quicken - and since May 1 I’ve written 21 of them. Several to the kids (to deposit into their accounts for spending money). Several for the cleaning service and other household services. And one or two miscellaneous others.
For person-to-person payments, this is often the simplest way to do it (assuming they don’t have PayPal or similar). And with remote check deposit, it can be nearly as painless as an electronic transfer. I’m just annoyed that my kids’ credit union doesn’t allow that unless you have direct deposit from an employer.
When I transfer money, I can send the recipient an email, SMS or both, containing all the transactions’ details. Several of my clients made use of the same feature, which meant we got a “you got paid” email in our work inbox as soon as they uploaded the data to their bank’s servers - as my colleagues seem to be evenly divided between “has enough nest for a year or more” and “lives hand to mouth”, this feature cut down a lot on the time the second kind spent anxiously consulting their own accounts from work.
Transfers here always say who they are from, and always require something to be put in at least one of the “description” fields.
This is such an amazing difference between the US and the rest of the world. I just can’t imagine paying the babysitter or the PTA or the karate school by a direct transfer. Also, I’m not sure the assumption that everyone has a bank account or that everyone has the computer or smartphone necessary for an electronic transfer is valid here. Anyone can cash a check, though.