I do write checks regularly. I get mobile meals delivered, and they prefer to have a check written out for the week and given to the driver who delivers Friday’s meal. So that’s 52 checks a year. Everything else goes on my debit card or from ACH withholding.
Even when I “balanced” my checkbook, I never understood all the hoopla over balancing the checkbook as if it was some complicated exercise. Write a check, write it down. Basic math, pretty simple.
As far as the online stuff goes, if you still write checks they can take a long time to show up. People forget and not everyone has or can afford a significant cushion (my accounts have a little extra I pretend doesn’t exist). I don’t have to use checks at all but every once in awhile I use one strategically. I had one recently that took 2 months to process.
ETA: I see a lot of people saying they use debit cards. I’m guilty of that, too, but I really think it’s smarter to use credit cards for as much as possible (regardless of incentives) and then just pay the credit cards online.
That depends, maybe on how and where it’s initiated. When I pay my bills online the payment is usually credited to my bill immediately but it’s at least 1 more business day until it comes out of my checking account. If I used bill pay from the bank (or just transferring money to someone else) I guess it would be gone right away but I prefer to initiate all payments from the creditor accounts. For example, I got paid this past Friday and paid all my bills (and all the balances were adjusted) but my checking account has not moved yet. Some will come out tomorrow and others Tuesday.
Can confirm. I’m 40 (Australian) and have never ever had a cheque book, or written a cheque. Reading this thread is like listening to old codgers talk about gathering around the wireless, or sending a telegram 
I have received the odd cheque (from Medicare, 10 years ago), and had to walk into an actual physical bank and ask them what I needed to do to turn it into money.
Why would you need to pay interest? I haven’t paid interest on a credit card in probably 30 years. Quite the opposite, my CC company pays me points that convert to cash every quarter.
I only write checks if I’m forced to. At this point it’s the local solid waste facility (the dump). It’s the only payment they accept. Other than that I never write checks. I don’t carry cash for that matter.
And can I add this, if you instist on writing checks at the supermarket please, please don’t go through the express line.
I have never had a debit card and don’t plan on getting one soon. I use a credit card instead. If fraudulent or erroneous charges are made to a credit card account, I can withhold payment on the disputed charges. If my checking account has been drained by those charges using a debit card, I still gotta eat. That payment has been made an I have to get it back.
The US banking system is decades behind the rest of the civilized world.
Since the OP, most of us have acknowledged that writing checks is a rarity. However, there are certain situations (such as the ones I described) that it is still the most efficient or secure method. It’s not typically a good idea to give cold hard cash as a wedding, birthday, etc. gift due to ease of theft. And Venmo’ing a gift is just not the same.
Not to mention you need some information to Venmo. At least a phone number or email. I’ve reached the point in life where I don’t have that information for most of the people I’m giving wedding gifts to. It’s not that they are strangers, but I’ve never had a need to get my cousin’s kid’s email address or phone number. It’s easier to write a check and stick it in a card than it is to get that email address or phone number when I get the invitation. ( And even though responses may go through a website or to a phone number, it’s often something that’s specifically set up for the wedding, not their actual email address or phone number. So who knows if they will even check it after they’ve gotten all the replies )
One of the problems is that the US banking system is incredibly fragmented, so it’s hard to do anything new. We’re about ten times the size of Canada but we have, I think, at least a hundred times the number of banks.
That’s exactly true.
Canada has like, what 5 major banks? So, of course it’s easier to get them all to play by the same rules.
The first time I balanced a checkbook, it took me 2 hours to balance it to the penny, because, as you said, this is simple math. It just didn’t make sent to be off by 3 cents. I kept trying for about a year, being satisfied to be within a dollar, or a few dollars, or ten dollars, and finally decided that life is too short. I just keep a fat cushion in my checking account.
I never understood what was supposed to be so difficult about balancing a checkbook. You write a check, you subtract the amount. It’s basic subtraction a child could do.
Quicken is your friend. 
I’ve gone through 4 upgrades since the 90’s.
It’s the only way to keep track of electronic payments. I keep a note pad on my phone. Jot down the store or web site and amount. Enter it into Quicken later.
I want to know about it if someone else is charging stuff behind my back.
It’s not that the math is difficult. But it can be a pain to write every single transaction down in the checkbook. It wasn’t a big deal 30 years ago when I was paid with paper checks and had to go to the bank to deposit them,and I paid my bills with paper checks so I had the checkbook out anyway and there were just a few ATM transactions I had to add. I’d have to enter 6 paychecks and maybe 25 checks ( probably fewer) in the register each month. Now I would have to enter I don’t know how many bill payments, debit transactions and ATM transactions each month- but it’s a lot more than 25. I don’t bother with any form of register at all anymore - looking at my online statement will let me know if there are any transactions listed that shouldn’t be even without doing my own recordkeeping and math and I have enough of a cushion that I’m not worried about bouncing a check.
But I actually think when people talk about balancing a checkbook being difficult, they are talking about reconciling it with the bank statement. It was never difficult for me to do it- but then again, as long as I was within $10, I was good with it. My husband was another story. This is a man who used to each night compare how much cash he had left to how much he should have had left* . If he was off by so much as fifty cents (in either direction), he would spend hours looking for the discrepancy. If he was off $10 reconciling the checkbook with the statement (in either direction) it would have been days before he would stop trying to find it. ( and it was typically that he made a mistake when he entered a check into the register)
- “I started the day with $50, I spent $21.22 on gas, and $5.36 on lunch and .50 on a pack of gum. I should have $22.92 left but I only have $22.42? Where’s the other .50?” Replay the whole day until hours later he remembers putting two quarters in a parking meter.
The problem with balancing paper accounts is not doing that, it is finding out three weeks later you subtracted wrong or that you missed a deposit and withdrawal. Digging through a month’s worth of entries when you don’t match the bank statement is a real pain.
Since I use Quicken I don’t even bother trying to correct the paper ledger unless we missed something big. There are typos in Quicken also, but matching the totals of deposits and withdrawals it gives you against the bank statement shows where the problem is very quickly.
Another really nice feature of Quicken is classifying expenses. Last year we had over 7.5% of our reduced income in medical expenses, and since they were all in Quicken generating the totals was very simple.
Just before I retired we used it to see how much we were really spending, and it was nice for that also.
We use a really old version, since we don’t care to have it communicate with our bank.
Balancing your check book is not the same as maintaining a running balance.
To balance your checkbook, you compare your ledger and your statement, and note those items in your ledger that are not listed in your statement, and note all fees and interest (yes, interest on a checking account) in your statement that you haven’t entered in your ledger.
You add unposted checks and subtract unposted deposits to your ledger balance and verify it matches your statement balance, which it won’t because you forgot the fees and interest, which you add and subtract, respectively. All this makes perfect sense when you are doing it. However, if you do the match by hand, you make a mistake, because you always miss one digit in the column of numbers, and if you are using a calculator, you misplace a decimal or transpose two digits.
Spreadsheets, of course, make all this simpler, because they seldom make calculation errors and your can find entry errors very easily, but why would you do that, when you can just look up your account & balance online?
As someone who balances dozens of bank accounts every month, I’m glad that Quickbooks makes it fairly easy. It’s really easy when it pulls the transactions down from the bank automatically in QBOnline, and similar for desktop if I manually download the bank feeds. It’s an absolute pain though when businesses decide to not use these conveniences and manually log all their credit card payment receipts at the end of the day in one transaction even though they might not get paid on the same day because different cards have different float times. Or they log 2-3 days of sales all in one deposit, with each card type separately, but some of them get combined in the payment log on the bank statement. It’s a real chore to even make sure the deposits in QB matches the bank deposits, which is why they hire our firm to do it for them. At least with checks and other payments from their account they rarely combine or split up entries that are the opposite way on the bank statement - but it does happen. Of course there’s transactions they forgot about and some transactions for the wrong amount, which are always “fun” to try to find.
But all through that, I always, always, always get it to reconcile down to the penny, because being off a few cents might mean that you have missed matching multiple items. On at least one occasion I managed to reconcile it but did not actually have the right transactions cleared, but the ones I was off were a net of zero, so it looked like it reconciled. When I went to do the next month, though, it was clear that I had done the previous month wrong. I do realize though that it’s much easier when you have a program designed to do it rather than using your calculator, but it’s mind-boggling that people would accept being off any amount so long as they are going through the effort to reconcile. I really don’t understand my mother who says she’s off 3 cents or something every single month (the same amount every time) - I’d think after long enough she’s make an adjusting entry recognizing that she’s off so that every month she can reconcile it perfectly.
I don’t balance my own checking accounts because I have no need to. As I mentioned above, I write very few checks, enough to keep track in my head when it matters. I keep track of what automatic payments I have and always leave plenty of cushion for them as well as potential emergencies before my next payday when I skim money off to my investment account. There’s never remotely a danger of being overdrawn unless there’s unauthorized access.
Agreed – I reconcile to the penny at work, and for the organization I’m treasurer for, but my own I leave enough extra to cover rounding.
In other news, cobblers’ kids go barefoot. 