Cheques

Last Friday, and it reminds me I've got a cheque I have to pay into the bank later today.

in the near future everyone will walk around with their own little chip n' pin device.

I think I used the business one a couple of months ago, for some stone-age co. I deal w/ who don't accept bacs payments.

Never mind cheques, I almost never even get cash these days. Out comes the debit card even for £2.50 sales. I almost never have any cash at all in the shop.

They're still very popular among companies that want to take small security deposits off you for things and can't be bothered with the extra charges or hassle of refunding you the money.

I wrote one last Saturday, as a deposit on a new car! Very exciting.

Pash, are the charges on those tiny electronic transactions not enormous, though?

We leave a cheque for the milkman. And my wife (who freelances) gets paid by cheque (panic every month waiting for the bastard to clear). But that's about it.

Yes, they are. Most shops here refuse small amounts.

It's been YEARS since I used cheques. I don't even use it for business payments nor do I accept it in our shop.

used them until this year for rent. get paid for freelance stuff in them quite a bit. more reliable than bacs payments b/c with those, people have a tendency of writing down account details wrong, which i never notice for months.

people have a tendency of writing down account details wrong

good point. I've been guilty of this myself!

my only concern about the cheque I have to write is where I've put the damned chequebook, which has been tucked away safely in one of my binbags full of clutter that I never ever use but won't throw away.

When I was in Brazil people used cheques the whole time, and without any ID. Then again, that was in the late 90s.

My current landlord for some reason won't let me pay our rent by standing order, so now I have to post a cheque each month. Luckily my cheque book wasn't hidden away in a box somewhere.

I have received 2 cheques in the last month, one for the deposit on our last place and one from Haringey council for the balance on our council tax. They're not completely dead yet.

The other week, for my rent. I also use cheques for things I have to send in the post, like magazine subscriptions and the like - I'd rather send a cheque than my debit card details.

Every month, to pay council tax and bills.

I have an innate distrust of automatic payments and things. Firstly, because they screw up too easily and it's so hard to get the money back if people mischarge you. And secondly because I like having a paper trail of when I paid the money, which you don't for bills if you do it over the phone or whatever.

yeah i use cheques to pay for my fruit & veg bags every month and sometimes because paypal is such a useless piece of fucking shit and it won't process anything and keeps going back to same page, it's like it thinks it's in an episode of red dwarf

Every month to pay my half of the mortgage and to pay my therapist who works out of her home and doesn't have fancy billing. Oh and I have to send a check today to get a transcript from a university I attended for one semester. Annoying.

Much prefer everything electronic draft. I don't even get paper check stubs or bank statements!

I know someone who wrote a cheque for £3000 to Th*m*sl*nk for a season ticket last September and they never cashed the cheque. Very happy bunny indeed. He stowed the money away in a building society in case they do cash it but afaik they're only valid for 6 months, so looks like he may have got away with it.

Don't like them. I don't like the idea that you can pay a bill with a piece of paper that you scribble on, put it in another piece of paper and seal it with spit, put your spit sealed paper in a tin box and wait for a strange man/woman to pick it up along with thousands of other pieces of paper sealed with spit to take it to a facility with even more pieces of paper sealed with spit, then it flies somewhere, then another strange man/woman picks it up and delivers it to another box. Too many places this could fail.

We pay our cleaning lady with a check.

Yes in general I think they're far less secure. Although now that they're becoming more rare maybe people will be more careful when accepting them.

Dud or dud, when someone in front of you at the grocery store pays by check? It's usually a little old lady so you can't get too mad but damn does it slow things down.

I have a work colleague who's in his 50s and very old-fashioned. Lovely fellow, but he has yet to master text messaging, so Internet banking won't happen in his world for years yet, and I've often spotted him writing cheques.

I haven't really mastered text messaging. :(

I still use checks to pay some bills. I wrote a dozen on our personal account last month, and four on my business account. But it's mostly debit and credit cards and EFTs now.

I get cheques from my parents and grandparents every birthday and Christmas. It's a step forward from pound coins sellotaped to the card.