Banks implement Check 21 starting Thursday

AP ^ | 10/28/4

[MarkL]

All I want to know is whether banks will continue to put holds for three up to five business days on checks deposited while the banks use your money...with no interest to the depositer by the way!

Yup... Even though the bank may get the actual cash value of a check instantly, they can still hold your deposits for as long as they want. My guess is that they won't do it though... There are simply too many banks that might look at not holding the deposited checks as a "feature" to attract new customers.

On the other hand, it's possible that they may wind up with a mixed system for quite some time... Holding some checks that don't clear electronicly, but allowing access to the funds immediately to those that do clear electronicly.

Mark

[MarkL]

Now I don't know if she were speaking authoritatively or not, but I was talking with a customer service manager at our local Wally World and she told me that when the system is implemented and the cashier runs a check through the register, the register will read the routing information, connect to the bank, and debit the account - sort of a cheap debit card. If the money ain't there, the register will spit it out.

There are places that have been doing that for some time now... There are 5 different stores I've been to that when I write a check, they run it through a machine sort of like a credit card machine, and it endorses the check, and they hand me back my check and the receipt!

This cause me some very serious problems using Quicken to balance my check book!

I use an automatic download to reconcile my checking account from my bank, and I was a bit lax about watching my statements for about 3 months... I finally noticed that my statements said that I had about $400 more in my account than I thought I did! Well, I tried backtracking my account, and found that I had a number of checks that were entered into my Quicken register twice! Once by me, and once using the electronic vendor code, rather than the payee! Basicly, in my version of Quicken, if they don't match exactly (and they never do), Quicken assumes that they're different transactions! It also occasionally happens with my automatic payroll deposits, but I learned a long time ago to keep an eye on those! The only way to fix this (at least in my version of Quicken: 2003) is to manually match up the electronic transactions.

Mark