Body & Soul4 mins ago
cheques not allowed?
20 Answers
I bought petrol this morning and a packet of fags costing �15.76 and paid for it by cheque. I dont get paid until Friday so thought I would save the cash I had. Ive never heard this before from anyone when paying a cheque but the guy in the garage asked me that next time could I pay by another means.
I said why and he said it is because he gets charged 27pence by his bank for every cheque that goes through.
As i use this garage every now and again and also see the owner in the launderette I didnt want to be rude really and say what I thought!! So I just said "well I will pay you 30p if I pay by cheque again" and he sort of laughed. He also mentioned that soon cheques are going to be phased out by banks... has anyone else heard this? I think its terrible, I rely on cheques at this time of the month (just before payday) to get me through with stuff like petrol and food shopping, not to mention paying bills. I know you can pay by debit card etc, but it takes time over the phone to keep reading the card details out. Im much more organised with a cheque book and can keep check of what's going through my account easier....
Also - should I use a cheque again at his garage? I dont know what to now... maybe boycott it?!
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So it's you! Holding up the queue in the supermarket buying a sandwich with a cheque. Yes to your question, I work in a bank and they are doing all they can to reduce cheque usage and hopefully will eventaully be able to phase them out. The main stumbling block at the moment is sending cheques in the post to pay for things. Otherwise debit cards can be used. One way of forcing the issue is these charges, ie retailers will refuse to take them. I guess the answer is better budgeting!
To be honest i cannot understand why people never have cash, i see how a cheque can tide you over but you are just shifting money about, unless you o/d you have only the money that you start with in total, just don't over spend, find a safe place to keep your cash at home. Do not give in to the banking system that charges you for organising difficult ways of accessing your funds, uses your cash to lend to others at a profit, then charges you for doing it. We have been ripped off by the banks for centuries, please don't encourage them!
Hi goldheart. I agree with you. How ridiculous is this man.... of couse you should pay be cheque if you need to. It's not your fault he gets charged 27p for a cheque....is he going to say this to every customer who pays by cheque?? If so, he will loose a lot of business. I have not heard anything about banks phasing out cheques? I'm sure that is not true.... what about travellers cheques?? Will they phase these out too?? How stupid... this man in the petrol station obviously knows nothing.
It's so easy to say better budgeting is the answer, but for those on low incomes it just isn't that simple. Since we had our little girl our money situation changed completely. Apart from the time my partner had to take off, my daughter now also goes to nursery, which is costing me an extra �560 per month! Every penny is pretty much allocated for, so if something goes wrong with the car, or something else happens unexpectedly which needs dealing with there and then, there isn't much of an option. At this moment i would LOVE to have the option of keeping a little cash to one side for emergencies, but if you aint go it, you aint got it. Cheques can be a godsend at the end of the month for the reasons goldheart has already stated. Gotta say, i love the idea of givin the garage a cheque plus 30p costs......... Nothing he can complain about then is there !!
Can I ask Loosehead why is sending cheques the main stumbling block at the moment? Why are they a hassle? Not to be disrepectful but are banks just getting to greedy and too lazy to deal with all this?
There are many unforeseen circumstances that crop up throughout the month - car maintenance, property maintenance, accidents and incidents!!! I think its a shame that you cannot understand why some people never have cash.
Everyone lives differently, thats why there isnt just "one" payment method for everyone and one bank account for everyone. They are obviously trying to do it but aren't considering everyone's needs.
Maybe you are on far too much money to even have to TRY and understand why people are skint! : )
It's when you send off for something in an advert or because you want to send a cheque to pay a bill. You don't actually have to send a cheque there is usually a way to pay by credit/debit card but a lot of people do not trust these methods and so they send a cheque. It takes a brave retailer to say they do not accept cheques, that's why they are the main stumbling block. In reality there are very few reasons why cheques are actually needed. Indeed one criticism levelled at banks is that they take 3 days to clear and they claim the interest, blah blah etc but in your case Goldheart you actually use the clearing time to spend money you don't have so it works both ways. The truth is that cheques cost the banking system hugely in time/fraud/admin all sorts, believe me if they could get shot of cheques tomorrow they would!
It's not about being on too much money it's about spending less than I get as income, a notion that seems to been forgotten these days. When I was brought up credit wasn't available and you wouldn't want the stigma if it was. If you didn't have the money you didn't spend it, simple no body ever starved. Very few things you must have now, arrange you life so that you are not susceptable to every unexpected change. I have a car, if it doesn't start I ride my bike, if I haven't got the money to fix my car then I wait until I have! Most people who have loans etc pay each month, If they turned that on it's head and always saved the money monthly whether they needed to repay a loan or not, they would have money for rainy day items. You see it's a way of thinking it's not about earnings it's about how you use it. Remember if you spend �1 more that you earn you will always be skint and be paying someone interest!
I see what you're saying Loosehead I really do, and I know its probably the best way... but in an ideal world and of course ...if you work in a bank!
Dont take this the wrong way but I hate it when people say stuff like "when we were growing up it was much different" - or "we had it much harder back then" " we didnt have this, or that".... however the world / times change and we have to adapt to it and people get sucked in along the way, whether they know it or not.
Living beyond your means is not a choice for everyone so LONG LIVE THE CHEQUE BOOK! HOORAH!
shops have the right to refuse cheques if they so wish but to say it is because of the charge they are charged is a bit petty as most shops state that any cheque for less than �10 will have a charge of usually 70p added. this is so that they dont end up making a loss from bank charges as anything under �10 is such a small profit they may not make more than �1 profit as it is and then if the bank takes some of that profit just to cash a cheque then u can see why they arent keen! but to not use a method of saying that if u spend less than X amount u may be charged Y charge on top isnt really giving u many options!
My guess is he doesnt want to cash cheques anymore for whatever reason that may be!
So have banks just made this decision to phase out cheques then? Have they discussed it with their customers? Does this include Building Societies? I too use a cheque to pay for my shopping every week and will be distraught if they phase out cheques as quite often they have been handy to tide me over. I don't have a debit card either.
I'd be happy to see cheques phased out but I'm an evil heartless git with no sympathy for those who use them to spend money that they don't have.
If you're doing this every month before payday then you're really just spending next months wages before you get them. As such, that means that the amount going into your account is exactly the same as that going out. Surely you can find a tiny bit of spare money to put aside so that you can use this one month instead of next months wages? It might take ages to build this up but at least then you'd be straight. If you can't do this then you're maybe living beyond your means.
My main gripe with cheques is the amount of fraud that they're responsible for and there's LOTS of it. They're cumbersome and people very often write cheques, forget who they're to and see mystery debits on their bank statement.
If you're doing this every month before payday then you're really just spending next months wages before you get them. As such, that means that the amount going into your account is exactly the same as that going out. Surely you can find a tiny bit of spare money to put aside so that you can use this one month instead of next months wages? It might take ages to build this up but at least then you'd be straight. If you can't do this then you're maybe living beyond your means.
My main gripe with cheques is the amount of fraud that they're responsible for and there's LOTS of it. They're cumbersome and people very often write cheques, forget who they're to and see mystery debits on their bank statement.
Well Otrere, I wouldn't say they've made a "decision" I think it's more an inclination, curiosly enough one driver is to address the problems of it taking 3 days to clear, and getting accused of making 3 days interest, probably by the same people who use a cheque book to borrow interest free at the end of the month, but I digress. Another is that cheques are one of the last major un tackled sources of fraud. They are turning their attention to cheques - now that chip and pin is firmly on it's way in - as the next target.
I'm sorry but I worked in a bank for 18 years and ALWAYS 'anticipated my salary' (as it was called).
At one point years and years ago, bank managers used to get the cheques written by bank employees and examine them to ensure that they weren't dated just before payday (obviously they could tell who actually had money left just before payday nad who had none, like me). Even though this no longer goes on, writing cheques knowing that you don't have funds at the time of writing but will have at the time of presentation is still an offence.
After all this, I have to admit that some of us are just useless at budgeting and I still do it every month. No matter how hard I try, there is always something that I need to pay for 2 days before payday and using a cheque is better than a credit card!
Forgot to say, I work part-time in a local corner shop and the owner charges 35p for every card transaction, whether it be debit or credit card. This is because, at the time he introduced the charge, that was the exact amount that a certain bank charged it's business customers for processing card payments.
Strange how he doesn't charge a penny for payments by cheque when the bank charge 43p for processing each of his cheques - I don't think he has realised that it costs him more to accept a cheque for free than to accept a card payment but charge 35p.
Funnily enough I cant... my boyfriend is �1500 overdrawn with no income at the moment as he's been made redundant, and he is crap with money etc - and they gave him the overdraft... with me, they wont, and i have had regular salary going in for the last year (since I opened the bank account)... the most I go overdrawn by is �100 and that is only occasionally, but when I ask they wont give me one because they use the scoring system and my rating is crap too!!
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