Absolutely no one I know keeps a checkbook balance anymore. The whole convenience of a check card is not having to get out something and write something down when you make a payment. We have the ability to see our balance online on our phones. It’s a bit of a pain to have to constantly remember to subtract a little more from the balance, until the one day you actually deposit the check.
And all the rolleyes in the world aren’t going to make people change to your way of doing things.
I don’t whip out a checkbook and write my transaction down right there at the grocery checkout, no. But do I save the receipt and enter it into QuickBooks at home? You betcha. How can I know where my money’s going if I’m not keeping track of it?
Most major banks’ online banking will let you import records directly into Quicken/QB, a feature which I used religiously for about six months, until I concluded it wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I do still recommend the practice to those with more complicated financial lives than mine (not a difficult status to achieve).
…in NZ checks (cheques) have gone the way of the dodo: hardly anyone uses them now. Most transactions are either cash, eftpos, or direct bank transfers and most transactions happen at the latest overnight: but most will process immediately. I simply double check my transactions when I log into my internet banking (at least twice a week) and again at the end of the month when the statement arrives. Paying power, rent, electricity, are all done by direct bank-to-bank transfer.
I hadn’t thought about the check card / debit card thing. I never had those. I just write about 2 to 3 checks a month, one of which is to my wife. FWIW, I always use a credit card. I can actually save a lot of money that way.
The other reason for cashing or depositing a check quickly, especially if it was a gift, is that if you dawdle about with it, the person who sent you the gift may conclude that you either a) don’t need or appreciate the gift and in future you will get just a card or maybe something crocheted. or b) are careless and have lost it, and therefore don’t deserve another generous gift so you will get an inspirational angel figurine for your next birthday.
Well, I once had my account go overdrawn when somebody deposited a cheque long after I had written it to them. Admittedly it was much more than 10 days in that case, but yes, I think it is rude.
Your bank/debit/credit card company does this for you. I guarantee you they are more accurate than 99.9% of people that write down their expenses later. They do a couple billion of these transactions a day, if they were as error-prone as most people seem to think, it would be a real pain in the neck for them.
[COLOR=black][FONT=Trebuchet MS][COLOR=black][FONT=Trebuchet MS]Now I will concede that checks are undoubtedly more error prone than credit/debit cards because there may be human element involved that entered the amount of the check somewhere. So if anyone is really concerned with reducing chances of someone making an error with their money, use a debit/credit card and get the info from the bank. [/FONT][/COLOR][/FONT][/COLOR]
ETA: Someone mentioned that people not cashing small checks was dangerous because it is easy to forget you wrote it and not notice it. If you overdraft your bank account because you forgot you wrote a $20 check, you have bigger financial problems.
I used to drive my mom nuts by procrastinating cashing her checks. It messed with her book keeping and checkbook balancing and without fail I’d eventually get a call demanding to know why I hadn’t taken it to the bank yet.
On the plus side, now when she gives money she uses cash. 
What would happen if you wrote “Void after 30 days” on the memo line. I’ll bet a bank wouldn’t get in much trouble if they cashed it anyway…but I’ll bet that the payee would cash it quicker.
That’s a good point - don’t write a check if it’s not good immediately (or tell someone if they need to wait). It causes problems. Especially for small businesses.
About a month ago someone did that to my employer. Thanks to that check bouncing it set off a chain reaction that led to other checks bouncing, including some paychecks. Thanks, jerks.
Of course, the banks raking in their fees for all this were quite happy…
I’ve never in my life balanced a checkbook so I wouldn’t care if someone I write a check to keeps it for a week, six months, a year… I’m also really really ready for both cash and checks to go away, but some bills in the US can still only be paid by check, and if you’re at a gun show or flea market a lot of the sellers are just people buying and selling a few things after their day job, so they have no way of accepting credit cards, so if they’re not willing to accept a check you have to carry huge wads of cash.
Online? My online banking tells me every transaction…the amount, the date, and the place.
And I’m another one who considers the money gone as soon as I sign that check. I mentally deduct it from the “running estimate” I keep in my head, which is within $100 of my actual balance 95% of the time…and I’m at a point in my life where a $100 swing doesn’t matter. Obviously, this isn’t true of all people, and hasn’t always been true for me. Just five years ago I was living ‘paycheck to paycheck’, so I was much more diligent about my balance…I was checking it at least once a day online, and my mental estimate was almost always within $10.
But as others have said, when you only right one or two checks a month, and everything else is either cash or a transaction that posts within a day online, it’s not as hard to keep track of, IMO.