A few times when I ran out of checks and was moving so didn’t want to order checks with my soon to be inaccurate address
Brian
I bought my car with a cashier’s cheque in 2007. The dealer would not accept any other form of payment. And there was no waiting for it to clear.
My daughter sent a French franc money order to a hotel in Paris in 1997 that would accept only pre-paid reservations in French francs and no credit cards. A real nuisance.
Probably 40 years, but out of interest I’ll add a note:
Around here, a counter check (which is a Bank Note) was as good as cash. We have 4 big banks here. Before that, maybe 8: before that, not much more. And check accounts used to be much less common here than in the USA.
But, like cash, you wouldn’t want to send a counter check in the mail: they’re Bank Notes, like cash. So, since you don’t have a check account, the way to send money by mail was by a (registered) postal order. Fortunately, the need to send money by mail was rare: you could almost always (99.99%) pay cash at a local office. For international transactions, there was bank transfer and (later) credit cards.
Actually, just notices that I bought the car ~ 3 years ago with a bank/counter/cashiers cheque. And I’d guess that’s the most common way to put a deposit on a house in this city.
I never understood this. You write a check and give it to someone. If they cash it in 5 minutes, 5 days, 5 months, or 5 years what difference does it make? The money has been spent.
Do you want the old-fashioned answer or the new answer? Old-fashioned is that it just drives some people crazy when they reconcile their statement/register and have to account for the uncashed check month after month after month. New answer is lots of people don’t keep a running balance- the rely on the info in the app, or the ATM and their memory for the one or two checks they write each month.Which causes trouble when they forget about one of those uncashed checks and they don’t/can’t keep a big enough cushion in the checking account that it doesn’t matter.
We just had to purchase a money order for the first time in at least decades (possibly ever). Our son will be studying in Italy in the fall, and he needs a student visa to stay in the country for that long (roughly 4 months). The consulate that issues visas for Colorado residents is in Chicago, and they require payment by money order (I think we could’ve paid cash if we’d gone to the consulate in person). No checks, no credit cards.
So, money orders are still good for something, even for those of us with bank accounts and credit cards and upper-middle class means.
Once for sure in 1979 to order a part from a company that didn’t take checks or credit cards. I think maybe once or twice since then but I don’t recall any specifics.
OK, I understand that. I do not write many checks, maybe a couple a year. I have enough to cover anything and never bother with reconciliation.
I have a funny little story about a cashier’s check. Maybe, several decades later, someone here can explain it to me!
In the early 1980’s I took a job in France and, thinking that having some money there might be convenient, I purchased a Cashier’s check from the Bank of America for $9000 or thereabouts; I did know that bank had a branch in Paris. Silly me.
I presented the check at the Paris branch of Bank of America and was told they weren’t a retail bank: I could open a checking account but the fee would be ridiculously expensive. Fine, I said, just cash the check and give me French francs. She took the check and spent about a half-hour studying some book.
By the time she came back, the branch had already closed and she told me that she’d verified the signature and that my cashier’s check was a genuine Bank of America cashier’s check! (Great news, I thought.) ***But she would not cash it for me! *** 
:smack: And she showed me the back of the check where, printed plain as day, was “Payable in the U.S.A.”
She did offer to give me a smallish cash advance. (How would that work, I wondered? Would she keep the check as collateral for the small advance??) I said no, and eventually redeemed the check on a trip back to the States.
What was that all about?, I wondered. She made me wait half an hour to tell me she wouldn’t cash the check. (BTW, this story barely makes the Top Three list of occasions when Bank of America has annoyed me personally.)