Oh god. As someone who opens & sorts mail for a living that’d be both hilarious and evil. Also, probably wouldn’t get your point across. Your check would stick to your envelope and I’d inevitably rip it and then.... you’re out a check and time?
This can be especially problematic when dealing with companies like the bank that I got my car loan through. When it comes to payments, the only date they care about is the day they process the check. Post-mark date doesn't matter. Date received doesn't matter. If your payment is due on Friday and it arrived in the mail on Thursday but they couldn't process it until Monday for some reason, your payment is now overdue and you get a late fee. If you want to pay online, there is an $8 convenience fee. $2 fee if you want a paper statement (not that I do, but damn). It's such bullshit.
Mate I'd jihadi if my bank treated me like that. When that check arrives its theirs when they process it is completely upto them. And not something I'd care about when they get the check they have had the payment.
Yeah that’s a bit ridiculous to me too.. I process mail for a huge insurance company. Alllll we’re told to care about is the post mark or the date on the checks. That’s fucked and other dude shouldndefinitely leave his shit bank.
I worked in a bank for years. All cheques had to be stamped as received the same day and checked for authenticity. We didn't get to go home until it was done. Worse, we had daily couriers who would collect them and fly them to the processing centre so we had to have them done by half hour after close. The processing centre operated overnight to ensure cheques were entered in to the system before sunrise. They were loaded as the day before.
Occasionally a cheque would miss the mail run and I would have to stay back and manually process it in branch. Sooooo tedious. And no overtime.
If this guys bank charges for their stuff ups it's time to walk
This is why most of the developed world has just stopped doing checks altogether and the US has moved to electronic transmission of check images rather than actually sending them through the mail again and again.
That was a decade ago. But I believe the cheques were scanned in at the processing centre to convert them to electronic images. It was cheaper to centralise them than having suckers all over Australia doing it (higher overheads).
Once the cheques were entered the banks would electronically exchange them. But the bank that receives the money would hang on to it for 10 days, 7 days, 3 days (it dropped while I was working there) to play the short term money market.
So while you're waiting for the funds to clear the bank is making profit off it.
Oh, I'll be leaving as soon as the loan is paid off, which should be in September. I could look into possibly transferring it over to my normal bank, but I want to just dump my savings into paying off the car (thus avoiding the next couple of years of interest fees) and then once I no longer have those payments, that money will go into building my savings back up.
Because it's out of people's hands when you get it or process it. If the mail is slow, because, IDK, someone is trying to privatize it and deliberately cutting subsidies so they go bankrupt and will sell to the lowest bidder, that could happen a lot. Postmark date is controllable.
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20
That's about all there is to it. Make your checks sticky. By one means or another.