I pay most of my bills online from my bank account or by credit card but there are a few situations where I still write a check
Paying estimated taxes
Paying real estate taxes
Holiday gifts
Gifting to my daughter
Bills from people who work on my house and don’t accept credit cards
If you no longer write any checks how do you pay for these types of expenses.
Paying estimates is easy with… IRS Direct Pay using your bank routing. Your state should have a similar thing for state estimate.
I don’t think my son has checks, he pays his rent, utilities, credit card, etc online with bill pay or credit card.
Checks are by far the most insecure form of payment. I cannot believe they have lasted this long. We starting moving away from checks a couple of years ago and I haven’t written a check now in 18 months.
I only write a few checks a year. Checks are a dangerous thing.
I work in the finance department at a fairly large company. We still process many hundreds or even a thousand checks per month. Numerous occasions, people have intercepted the account and routing numbers and attempted to process fake checks. It is rare that one actually gets through but the headache is just not worth it. They can raid your checking account and steal everything before you receive your statement.
If you were most concerned about it, you would write checks from a disbursement only account. This would need to be at a different bank than your primary checking and savings accounts. You would need to keep minimal amount of money in that disbursement account. When you need to write that big check, you would first need to fund it so there was sufficient funds to clear the check. This is a real pain in the ass and not really a great option but it would be the safest option.
If you have a bogus check passed on your personal account that have tons of money in it, you are going to have two major problems. First your money is tied up while it is being resolved. Two you have to get a new account and change all your things that are tied to that primary account.
If its a disbursement account with insufficient funds they bank will likely reject the payment. You have no lost money. Then you simply get a new account and new checks and move on.
If you do these accounts at the same bank, you would need to make sure they can’t cross default on you. Oops the bank processed a bad check on this account so they will cover it with your primary account.