I still write an occasional check when we use small contractors who don’t want to pay the processing fee to a credit card company.
Speaking of autopay, I have credit cards with two credit unions. One of them allows autopay for the monthly balance, which means I don’t have to do anything at all and don’t pay any interest on the account. The other one, despite my bitching at them, still makes you go into the account every month and physically obligate the funds. Despite having reminders set up for myself, I’ve twice forgotten to do this and ended up with a huge account balance along with finance charges the following month. It’s most annoying.
I agree with others you have to be pretty technophobic not just ‘not of the younger generation’ to be writing significant number of checks now, personally anyway.
I write personal checks to the IRS, small one off charitable contributions now and then (bigger ones are credit card or transfer of stock), occasionally contractors, a few miscellaneous: maybe 10% as many as 25 yrs ago. Never at stores (that really is ‘welcome to the 1990’s’ ), almost all regular bills though electronic bill pay from checking account. It’s just easier.
We do some rental property business. In that world checks are less dead. All our tenants pay by check or money order. And we often pay (much more frequent than as homeowner) repair and other service providers by check.
I haven’t written a cheque in so long that I honestly couldn’t tell you when it was. Maybe for a school activity for one of my kids 10 or 15 years ago?
I pay all my bills on my phone through their app. In Canada we can send money to whomever through normal email, assuming the recipient also uses online banking, which I’m pretty sure everyone does.
I pay our cleaning lady by check. Other than her, I go months between writing checks. Can’t remember when I last paid by check at a store - just cash or plastic. I stopped carrying my checkbook with me sometime back in the '00s because what was the point?
If you go back thirty years, I wrote probably two or three dozen checks each month. The factors:
Couldn’t pay bills online, because no ‘online’ yet.
Grocery stores, for the longest time, didn’t take plastic (no clue why this was), so unless you carried wads of cash with you, you paid by check. This changed ~1990 in my part of the country.
If your income was on the low side, many credit card companies were slow to up your credit limit. I remember when my credit card company raised my limit to a whopping $700. If you could only charge but so much, you wrote checks because you wanted to be able to charge something big if an emergency came up.
I was wondering about that. Forty to fifty checks a month is like two every weekday. Who were you paying this frequently? Or did you just use a check for every single in-person retail transaction?
I’ll tell you, because I’ve had some companies, mostly my mortgage company, that would hold checks for WEEKS. They kept changing my account number and where to send it to so I couldn’t set it up online. I would write them a check, they would hold it for two or so weeks and not cash it. Though they would send me my next statement and still not have cashed the check. Even when I would do it online they wouldn’t process it for a couple of weeks sometimes.
I ended up refinancing just to get away from their strange practices. I was paying electronically for a year or so, on my last time I went to pay they shut down my ability to pay online. They wanted me to call as they knew I was refinancing.
I had to do all the math in my book, otherwise I could be off by $1300+ a month. Start adding in electric, gas, water, internet and there were times I had to make sure I wasn’t going to bounce something.
I’ve never seen something like in the OP. I’ve seen self filling out checks before, but it seems they can now just take the check and not even fill it out to deduct the money from the account.
The only checks I’ve written in the past 10 years are to my landscaper (who only takes checks) and to pay my property tax (they charge an arm and a leg for credit card payments).
Because if I go online to each utility’s website (or other creditor, such as a credit card company), I get a date-stamped confirmation from the utility/creditor that the bill has been paid on time.
While I’m there, I can also download the bill/statement (in PDF format) for my records.
You know those numbers at the bottom of the check, those are your account and routing number, the little machine they stick the check into reads those and automatically deducts the amount from your account.
Which makes writing a check instead of using a debit card completely pointless.
Thank God the check era is over. Waiting for someone to fill one out at the supermarket and then the ensuing I.D. check took far too long. On the other hand, once upon a time, being able to float checks before payday was a godsend for me.
Mobile Deposit. Very handy. Every time I get a reimbursement check from my district I deposit it from my desk at school without ever having to go to the bank. 2 pictures, a little data typed in, and it’s done. Confirm the deposit then shred the paper check. Takes all of 3 minutes.
I had no idea check writing had declined to this extreme. It’s not a topic that I ever asked friends or relatives about. My own has steadily declined throughout the past twenty years. A slower transition but I’ll catch up with the rest of you before much longer.
I plan to switch my utilities to paperless next. This thread informed me that I can still pay manually on a web site. That’s welcome information.
I’m still nervous about online banking. Phones and computers are just too vulnerable to hackers and viruses. A month doesn’t go by without yet another urgent Microsoft security patch. That doesn’t exactly give me much confidence in their security. It may be awhile before I take that leap of faith with my money.
I still write one a week for daycare. The fuckers changed their payment methods so now the options are:
Set up auto withdrawal from your account (this is what they really want)
Pay on-line with a credit card plus a $3 “convenience” fee
Pay by check
Their old system was electronic but I had to initiate the transfer. I don’t give anyone auto withdrawal access to my accounts. That’s just stupid.
So now every week I write them a check and let them pay someone to deal with it.
I despise writing checks, I pay everything electronically or just have it set up so the bank is cutting the check. That way, I know exactly when the money is coming out of the account. I don’t appreciate writing a check on the first of the month, say, only for the funds to not come out until the end of the month. Apparently some people or businesses don’t need my money as much as I do. The reason for this is because I don’t have an endless surplus in my checking account. We live paycheck to paycheck in my house.
In the 60’s I had a summer job at a bank note company. My coworker had a typesetting machine that would drop characters (name, address, account number) made out of lead. My job was to set the type (upside down and backwards) and make ready for the press.
After they were printed, the lead was remelted for more characters.
Every bill I have set up for autopay alerts me a few days before the money is withdrawn so I can review the amount and make any changes. It’s not a surprise.
More to the point: The check already has enough information on it for them to withdraw as much as they want any time they want, and only vigilance on your part and fear of being caught on theirs prevents them from soaking you for all you’re worth.
), almost all regular bills though electronic bill pay from checking account. It’s just easier.