No More Cheques

Tesco's, Booths, Sainsbury's and many other companies are no longer accepting cheques, which is bad if you are an elderly person and rely on others to do you shopping. What will you do now - give them your debt card and pin number? Yes, this is now what some people have to do if they are unable to use cheques, they have no alternative. How safe is this system? Well that depends on the honesty of the person to whom they hand their debit card and pin number.
The cheque system is slow and pron to fraud, really it has had it's day and is now obsolete we live in the twenty first century. Online banking systems are improving in the UK but they have a little way to go to catch up with other counties like New Zealand. Okay banking in NZ is no longer free which is something I am still getting over but I can buy online and pay via my online bank account and the transaction doesn't take three days, it's instant.
It was wonderful last year to buy flowers for my Mums online and not have to use a credit card and as my bank account was in NZdollars I didn't get charged any currency fee ,etc.
No more cheques for my wagers either now as my employer has set up direct payment and I recieved my first payment direct to my bank. Yeeepiiiii!! No more waiting for cheques to clear, no more worring that I will not have enough in my account to cover my direct debits because my wage for the last week has only just arrive in the post and now I have to bank it and wait for the standard three working days clearance.
Talking of this three day clearance how come it takes HSBC three days to recieve a payment to my credit card from my HSBC bank account?

I Hate Cheques!

I really do hate cheques, and don't understand why they take three days to clear in this modern age of technology. I banked a cheque on Tuesday (which appeared on my account that night) but don't actually have any access to it until Friday. The cheque is my pay for the last two weeks and I need it to clear on Thursday, as I have two large direct debts going out then. What to do, what to do!

In the pass I would have just used my Flexiloan and transferred monies across till the cheque clear and then transferred the monies back but I didn't think about the extra interest costs I was raking up by doing this. This time I will use my high interest account funds, which means I lose one months interest because of the withdrawal. The lesser of two evils I feel.

I've spent the best part of the last two days trolling through other peoples blogs on personal finance and they all seem to be doing really well. Not many of us single girls at this though I feel and most are American so we don't have the same financial reference points. This is also the problem with most books on dealing with debt, I generally skip the chapters on insurance or retirement, etc. as they are not relevant to someone in the UK. None the less, the slogg is the same and probably just as tedious, and I am sure many of them, like me, want to scream "Enough already!".