While no longer a common form of payment in the US, we still sometimes use them to pay for things like monthly bills and some large payments. It seems that a lot of countries have stopped using them altogether. Does your country still use them occasionally?

41 comments

  1. I haven’t sent or received a cheque in 20+ years. I think many British businesses might have stopped accepting them.

  2. I don’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque, easily over ten years ago.

    I work in finance tech for a food retailer, and covid was the last push to finally decommission our cheque printing application. We’d had certain business customers who preferred cheques and actual instore customers who when we owed them any money (for example, colleague accidentally scratches a customer’s car when collecting up trollies from the car park) wanted a cheque as they weren’t happy to provide their bank details to the company. Once our office workers moved home and couldn’t physically access the printers/cheques anymore, it became – BACS payment or you don’t get your money.

  3. No, practically never. I haven’t seen my chequebook in nearly 20 years. They are redundant and have been for quite a long time, as they’re not a reliable or instant form of payment. I know *one* person who still uses them, but he’s in his 80s and doesn’t understand what direct debits are.

  4. I’ve never seen them used in Germany, and I’m in my late 30s. I remember the 90s TV advertising of American Express Travelers Cheques (so: Just the advertising, not someone buying / using them in reality), but that’s it. I think they aren’t issued for many years by now and were replaced by EC / Maestro and Visa Cards.

    For monthly payments we use either “Dauerauftrag”, so a standing order for the bank to repeat the transaction in the given interval, or “Lastschriftermächtigung” – so you allow the company to take the money from your account.

  5. No.

    It has not even been possible to pay with, or cash in checks since January 1st 2017! Even way before that it has been very rare to write or receive checks. I can’t actually remember ever receiving or seeing a check, and I’ve been an adult for 22 years now.

  6. No, and I have never done it. They have never been particularly common here. The only time that I have seen or received checks is when they have been part of some prize or reward or something. Scholarships sometimes came in the form of checks for instance, back when I was in school.

  7. It has never really been a thing. In Finland the use of cheques peaked in the early 80’s, and by early 90’s they weren’t really used at all.

    I have never really understood why they are still in use, seems like extremely unpractical way to transfer money.

  8. Im in my 30s and Ive never used a check in any country I’ve ever lived in. I was made fun of by an american friend because I asked her how checks work, it’s like the telegraph for me just incredibly outdated.

  10. We don’t have checks anymore. I signed travelers checks back in the 1980s. But already in 1999 when well meaning American relatives sent us checks as wedding gifts, my bank didn’t know what to do with them.

    I was called into a serious meeting about these “serious” attempts at depositing these foreign pieces of paper. My bank relented and said that they just needed my American relatives banks I-ban numbers. American banks: “I-BAN what???”. *sigh!*.

    It took another two years before I finally got American relatives to understand that I CAN’T deposit checks from them!

    We’ve had ‘Dankort’ since 1983 and direct pay terminals since 1985. Then we had Dan-Visa card which worked the same way and now most people either just have a direct-pay VISA card or that and a Dankort.

    I wasn’t paying attention when my bank advisor very patiently explained all of this to me in 2021, when I finally decided to act like the 40-something I am and not leave everything related to our finances to my husband. I have a general comprehension/lack of interest issue in this. I’m not suffering from a language barrier. But I do have dyscalculia.

  11. I remember setting up a bank account in France when I lived there as a student in 2013. The banker asked me if I wanted a chequebook. I declined, since I’d never once needed to use my chequebook in the two years of being an independent adult while living in the UK and I thought France would be the same. Oh, silly me. Turns out the bureaucracy was so cumbersome in France that there were still things you needed to use cheques for. Thankfully, France has moved on since then too.

    I think I must have only paid by cheque once or twice in my entire life in the UK since then.

    Edit: Oh actually, as a teenager I’d often get cheques as presents from my grandparents on my birthday (we’re talking about £10 here, they weren’t funding my gap yah or anything) that I’d have to make a special trip to the bank to deposit. That was about 15 years ago, and it didn’t seem like a massively obsolete method of payment at the time. So I guess the turning point must have been around 2010-ish.

  12. I only know cheques from American tv. I’m almost 30, but I’ve never used any or even heard about other people using them.

  13. Never seen one in my lifetime, as kid it was always “the way americans pay” from US TV shows

  14. I was born when my country got its independence in 1991. Never saw a cheque in my life.

  15. I have never written one, but received one from the USA around 2010-2012. To cash it, I had to go to the main office of my bank and even still the employee had no idea how to do it.

    These days the advice on how to cash a check is: send it to someone in the USA you trust to cash for you.

  16. Still? Duh, maybe a hundred years ago. I’ve never ever seen someone paying with a check in my entire life. People use either cash or cards, with cards being more and more common, especially among younger and middle-aged people. And by card I mean either a physical card or smartphone / smartwatch / whatever. Maybe there are some people in Poland who do use checks, but they’re a very tiny micro-minority.

  17. I got a cheque book when I opened my first bank account in the 80s, put them in a drawer, and never saw them again

  18. No, never. They never had the same popularity as the US. Bank checks were somewhat widespread in Sweden in the 80s and early 90s, when they would more likely be used for one-off payments and not regular ones like rent. Now they’re non-existent. A few years ago the last banks stopped handling checks but even before that, it was a major pain to cash one.

    I had to cash an American check in Sweden once, sometime around 2010, and it was not a smooth process. Sweden was largely cashless already and all banking stuff handled online. I had to find a bank and a branch that would cash a check, go there in person, pay a significant fee and then it took at least two weeks until the money showed up.

    I can also speak for the ex-Soviet countries, where checks never became a thing. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed and the banking system emerged, checks were already past their peak in the rest of Europe and accordingly never got widespread. Some banks did offer them and early adopters of banking may have had checkbooks but most people would have started with something else as their payment method.

  20. No, we don’t. You can’t use them anymore, since we don’t live in 1980 anymore.

  21. I paid my apartment’s caution + first couple months of rent before moving in with cheques not to pay everything at once but that’s about it.

    I’ve seen old people insist to pay by cheque in grocery stores queues though. Instant eye roll from people behind usually because they take ages.

  22. No, and I can’t remember the last time I did. My chequebook was printed in 2003 and I have only a vague memory of where it is; I’m not even sure my bank prints them any more. Everything is paid by card or bank transfer; even my heating engineer gave me his bank details on the invoice.

  23. I only see checks in US movies, never with my own eyes. Contactless/blik are the most popular payment methods here

  24. Never used one in my life. My parents used to (seldomly) use them, so I have seen them, but that is it.

  25. No and from what i heard checks was never really that big here. I am 29 years old and have held a check once in my life and that was 10 years ago when i had gotten my first tax returns and hadn’t reported to the tax authorities what bank account i wanted them to send the money to. So instead i got a check and went to the bank and deposited it into my account, took a couple of days i think.

  26. No, only had to do it when I was in America and had an American bank account and needwd to pay for something.

  27. Austria

    The only time in 3 decades that I’ve ever got a check was in 2009 when UPS charged me too much VAT and send me the refund via post as a check. I was so confused lol

  28. I’m in my 50’s and I’ve only used a check twice: when I bought a car and when I signed the purchase contract for my apartment, both things in Belgium and both times the bank gave me the check, I have never had a checkbook. But I remember my parents using checks in Spain in the 70s, 80s.

  29. I’ve only seen one being used in the Netherlands once. Must have been around 20 years ago. My grandparents lived in France at the time and grandma was here for a visit. Somehow her French card got declined at the (Dutch) grocery store. Her proceeding to pay by check was the only time I’ve seen somebody use one in real life.

  30. My Grandma used to write a check that my mum or me would carry to the bank to withdraw all her pension in cash and bring it to her. We tried to talk her into a safer method, but to no avail. She died 20 years ago and that’s also the last time I’ve seen a check.

  31. It is no longer possible to redeem cheques at Dutch banks since 1-1-2021 because they are outdated and insecure. I thibk the last shops stopped accepting them in the nineties.

    Edit: withdrawal by cheque ended in 1994. Payment to businesses by cheque in 2002.

  32. It’s practically unheard of in Poland, I don’t even know if the option exists. Bills and large payments are all done via bank transfer. A couple of years ago my fathrvwas buying a flat from somebody who had a strange mistrust regarding the payment and didn’t want to sign the deed without the proof payment despite the notary and all – which rang some alarm bells in my father’s head and *he* wasn’t willing to transfer the money without having the deed. They eventaully agreed that my dad would transfer the money to the notary’s special account and the notary would transfer them after signing the deed. The point is, a check was never even considered as an option.

    The only time I used checks in my life was when I was an exchange student in US, in Poland, never. I know my parents did sometimes but that was like 20 years ago.

    Checks did exist in Poland in the past but were never popular. Poland, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, practically bypassed the checkes era and went from cash straight to money transfers and bank cards.

  34. It is impossible to redeem them for nearly a decade, and I have never ever seen one in my life.

  35. We still use them in France. I saw a stat once about the fact that France register like 50 % of checks in the Eurozone. But it’s definitely seen as outdated, and mostly used by elderly people.

  36. I have seen one check in my 28 years. My old bank sent it to me when they illegally allowed my father to withdraw all my savings three days before I turned 18.

    Mom was a champ and got me my money back. Regardless, I now have another bank, and I don’t see my father.

  37. Unfortunately yes – I was buying some groceries last week, I was fifth in the queue to the checkout and little did I know about 30 minutes that I was going to wait there because one person before me tried to pay with cheques. The cashier didn’t know how to do that and had to phone someone, then the computer didn’t want to process the payment and broke down, after they restarted it took around a million tries to scan each cheque individually. That hurt.

  38. Hungary has postal money orders that are called checks. Those are generally used for:

    – paying utility bills (usually can be done online and you even get a discount)
    – paying your car insurance (can be done online I think, but most people I know prefer it by check because then you have a payment confirmation that you need to have on hand for traffic control)
    – paying vehicle tax
    – if you’re unemployed, paying social security contribution
    – if you have a parking ticket, it usually comes in a red plastic bag with the description of why you got the ticket, some basic info where the appeal it, and a postal money order that you have to fill out to pay the fine

    I know postal money orders are a thing in my new home (Czechia), but I think no one calls them checks and I know that my company used to have some British and English clients in the early 2000’s that wanted to get checks instead of wire transfer, back then it was an option to have a checking account.

  39. never used check in my 46 years, not even have an opportunity to use one. This was always a really minor niche thing and banks are not issuing these for decades now.

    I remember during covid some americans living here received physical check and had hard times to make it to money as our banks are not now not interested in foreign checks either.

  40. I haven’t really heard of anyone using checks here in Sweden since the 1980s, or possibly early 1990s, and even then it wasn’t super common. I don’t think there’s a single store that would accept them. Monthly bills are usually paid online since every bank offers online banking here.

  41. Almost 40, and never once used cheques. Can’t recall ever see one used either. I do remember the old manual credit card things though, where you’d make an imprint on a receipt with a carbon paper. Carbon paper… remember that? Bet most people barely even know what CC in mails stand for anymore.

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