Check-ing out

Hi, my name is Ray, and my address, it would appear, is Jurassic Park. For my world is inhabited by dinosaurs.

Our music collection remains almost entirely in the once-popular compact disc format.  (We haven't had a turntable for decades and have kept few if any vinyl records, but those old-school LPs are actually turning out to be easier to find than CDs these days.)  Video divides roughly 50/50 here between streaming services and good ol' DVDs, along with a few Blu-Rays which play in the same living room device- I can't tell the difference in video quality- which are occasionally rented or borrowed but mostly are in our permanent collection.  (We do still have a VCR, and probably several dozen tapes from store-boughts to a few home vids of the kid as a baby, and every now and then I'll set it up to play a tape or record one onto a DVD.)  Neither of our newest laptops have an internal CD/DVD drive, but I keep an older laptop that does, and we both routinely use an external optic drive to burn music CDs to computers/phones.  We have a 35-year-old washing machine that is the Dean of Appliances, yet we refuse to connect any of the newer ones except audio/visual equipment to the Internet of Things, because the last thing I need is the dishwasher sexting with the toaster.

Yep. Get off my lawn.



None of this is new, which is kinda the point. In the past couple of weeks, though, I've finally given up relying on an old standby of business and financial lives, because their means of delivery have simply become so unreliable.

With very few exceptions, the check is no longer in the mail.



When we first saw that scene on Dead to Me a few seasons back, we laughed at the kid and sympathized with Jen. Now, more and more, I'm seeing things the younger way.

It's been a slow learning curve, not just for me but the economy in general. COVID certainly accelerated the trend away from the physical transaction of handing a pile of cash, or one of those funny things you "draw." Retailers have long resisted acceptance of paper checks; the few that will still take them at a point of sale will almost always convert them into electronic form as soon as they're accepted, so the funds will immediately come out of your checking account. The "float" is no mo', and that money better be there when you write the check or you're going to hear bad things from your bank, the merchant's bank and the merchant itself.

Banks have gotten a little better about not putting ridiculous holds on funds when you deposit a check into that account. In most cases, either all of the check or a good chunk of it (at least the first $250 or so) will be made available to you the day after your deposit. Also, to encourage customers to use ATMs for their routine transactions, most banks will consider a check deposited "that day" if you get it into one of their machines by 7 or even 8 p.m. At least they will if it's an account you can use an ATM for, and for two of mine, I can't. One, I understand, because, as we will see later, it's not my money:  my business trust account does not have an ATM card, so everything for that account, except the occasional wire in or out, I do by paper deposit slip and check. The other one is odder: although we have debit cards for our health savings account complete with PIN access to use them in an ATM, we can't use those machines to deposit checks to the account. That requires additional gymnastics so we can pay for our drugs.

You know, the prescription ones.

More and more, though, there's reluctance, if not resistance or even repeal, of the reliable old rectangle with the funny numbers on the bottom.  As usual, we're behind much of the world on this: way back in 2009, the UK waved Ta-ta! to what they called the "cheque":

Britain's banks are waving a long goodbye to the humble check. The council that governs the country's bank payment systems has voted to go electronic. The council says checks will still be accepted until 2018, but many are concerned Wednesday's decision will hasten the check's decline.

In 1990, Britons were writing 11 million checks a day. Now, that number has fallen below 4 million, and it is plummeting fast as an increasing number of people pay online, or with plastic. So, the U.K. Payments Council argues its decision to phase out checks over the next nine years simply pulls the plug on a system already in terminal decline.

Civic organizations oppose the move, raising fears it will affect millions of less well-off Britons, especially the elderly.

"It's going to add an extra tier of complexity to the lives of people who are struggling to live independently in their own homes," says Mervyn Kohler of the charity Age Concern.

Kohler says he worries many seniors will resort to carrying cash around, making them easy targets for muggers.

Many big businesses and store chains have already stopped accepting checks because credit, debit and online payments are so much quicker and cheaper to process.

I'm among the seniors with the mugging fears, because it's not unusual for me to have to shlep an electronic payment from a client in cash from our personal bank to my business one, because that "quicker and cheaper" isn't always as quick and cheap as it looks on the inside.

----

For me, there are two major problems with checks from clients: they come (or don't) in the mail, and they bear the risk of bouncing.  I get far fewer checks from opposing parties, but the mail delays are just as bad and the bounce risk is much higher.  I have one major business client who I do numerous things for every month. Twice a month, there's a deadline for when billing to them must be submitted, and payments are initiated a few days later. They used to post an annual schedule of these dates; now they do it quarterly. They were as reliable as the sunrise in terms of knowing whether, and how much, you would receive; unfortunately, after sunrise those checks got put on a mail truck somewhere in Ohio and they would take always two, more often three, and sometimes many more days to get here.  Late last year, they announced we could now elect the option of having those payments direct-deposited to our business accounts. Yay! Now an email shows up the day before the deposit from the processor, and the amount is securely sitting there the following morning without having to stalk the mailman.

Smaller clients aren't set up for this, but, like so many musicians I follow, they know their PayPal or their Venmo.  These are becoming the average new client's initial go-to suggestion for how to pay, after the former champion of Do you take credit cards? No I don't; for years it was too expensive, and even now, I can't get involved in taking credit card payments from incoming bankruptcy clients* so I can't take them from anybody.  Debit cards present less of a bankruptcy problem, but still involve the cost, and I don't think you can accept debit-only in these systems. So that leaves these new kidz on the financial block. PayPal is the oldest, originally set up by evil Republican Peter Thiel but becoming a Thing when eBay acquired it to assist in finalizing online transactions for its bidders/buyers. (It is now a separate company, though there remain some snags I've run into with some clients.) Others tried getting in on the action; banks themselves began pushing something called Zelle, which was pre-linked to your accounts and apps with those banks. We tried it for a few things and found it clunky and unreliable. The other one that's really taken off among the indies, though, is Venmo, which didn't have the negative associations PayPal had developed over the years from associations with eBay and eVilRepublicans.

You'll never guess who owns it.

I've never set either up for business proper. Partly because I suspect their fees are higher, but also because both of their smartphone apps can drain your bank accounts in a matter of seconds if somebody hacks into you, and unlike credit card transactions, you're shit-outta-luck getting it back because, hey, YOU authorized the transaction even if you didn't. Since a bad guy could access my trust account if they got into my operating one**, I simply don't have anything on my phone with either of these apps that would let them.

So when the client either insists on online payment or, as was the case this week, the "check in the mail" was delayed from 80 miles away by close to a month, I give them a personal email address to use for the transfer. When it hits that account, I withdraw the cash and head, immediately and trepidatiously, to my business bank to deposit it before I get mugged.

Even green folding money is becoming a nuisance for vendors.  I mentioned my surprise finding out last summer that Citi Field is entirely cashless once you're inside: the concession stands only take plastic or phone app payments. (Not sure about the beer vendors working the aisles, because by last summer I wasn't drinking any.)  A couple of places in my regular lunchtime rotation have gone cashless at their dedicated points of sale. Want to pay with actual money for your lunch at the Alberta Drive Wegmans or Lloyd Taco? You're shunted to the regular registers behind long lines or to the bar, respectively.

It's a lot to take in. And that's just money that's actually, eventually, mine. The other change du jour to mention concerns the money that isn't.

----

Hopefully you vill find this very interest-ink: my business bank has just changed the name of my trust account.



It was previously called IOLA ATTORNEY TRUST. "IOLA" is not a quaint old girls' name but stands for Interest On Lawyer Accounts. Those of a certain age in this legal community may remember a UB Bar Revue number where alumni and at least one sitting judge sang "I-O-L-A!" to the tune of the YMCA song when the program was first starting out.

It's an accounting kludge invented in the 80s to take the interest (back when there was any worth accounting for) earned on trust account balances and legally divert it to the state for funding of public good legal things. Back then, most lawyers kept their trust balances in non-interest checking accounts because of the near impossibility of accounting for what portions of an entire account's interest should be applied to which clients' money in that account. States responded by first offering, and almost all now requiring, the account to be interest-bearing and for the lawyer to agree to that interest being swept out of the account at the end of every month and sent to the Good Blue Fairy Department of the state court system, to fund legal aid and similar programs.  The tradeoff for this requirement was that the state pays the banks all fees associated with the account.  Back when interest rates were higher, and even now when real estate or business lawyers hold many thousands or millions in escrow at a time, this made sense. For me, though, most months result in New York paying my bank more in fees than they take from the account in interest.  But the law's the law, so I've done it.

Apparently those musical numbers, and regular reminders through seminars and registration forms,  weren't enough to keep dozens of lawyers every year from being disciplined or even arrested for stealing their clients' money out of these accounts. So with this subtle little hint, at least my bank has now made clear, every time you look, that it's not. Your. MONEY.

----

* Congratulations on making it this far.  What are the bankruptcy problems with a lawyer taking credit card payment? At least three: it may limit or even prevent that client from getting their debts discharged because they "ran up" a bill shortly before filing. Worse, if the debt to the credit card company does get discharged, the lawyer who knowingly took that card could lose their processing rights for participating in the transaction (and if that lawyer's in a firm, the whole firm could lose that ability). Worst of all, if the payment was over a certain amount, the lawyer might have to give it back for the benefit of the client's creditors- and the only thing worse than not getting paid is having to give back something you were paid.

** But I thought you said "everything for that account, except the occasional wire in or out, I do by paper deposit slip and check." That's true. It doesn't mean I can't do it by electronic transfer. The buttons are there to be pushed; I simply don't push them, because of a rule only allowing such things in limited circumstances. By keeping that bank off my phone and only accessing the Web from known locations through known browsers, I limit the bad guys' chances of getting in there and making off with what isn't theirs- or mine.