Our purpose is to save you money on Tradesmen quotes but I came across an article lately which might save you money writing cheques. It was in the Irish Independent Personal Finance section and was entitled, “Writing one cheque per week costs you €40 a year”. The gist of the article is that it is more expensive for paper based transactions and between the 30cent that banks charge cashing a cheque and the 50cent that the Government charges for stamp duty, you’re looking at about 80cent per cheque that you write. And that doesn’t include the cost of postage!
Something that wasn’t mentioned in the article was the cost of lodging cheques. If you leave out any cost that the bank may charge you for lodging a cheque, just the fuel cost, parking cost and time that is incurred for lodging a cheque can be a lot higher than you think. For example let’s say you have to travel a mile there and back to the bank @ 20cent per mile, that’s 40cent for fuel, parking could be 1euro for half an hour and then you have the time travelling in and out and waiting in the queue could be another 40 minutes which if you count in at even 8euro an hour for your time is costing you over 5euro. So altogether it is costing you €6.40 to lodge the cheque. If you lodge one or more cheques per week that’s costing you over €300 per year!!
A policy that I have started using lately is first of all to ask anyone paying us to pay by bank transfer but if the person still insists on paying by cheque I now lodge the cheque by post. I have a cheque lodgement book in which I fill out the details (if you don’t have a cheque lodgement book I presume you can just get a handful of lodgement slips the next time you are at the bank) and put it and the cheque or cheques into an envelope and post it to the bank. I find that as well as saving money it also saves time and let’s me concentrate on the work I am doing.
You can find the original Irish Independent Article here
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Cheers
Oliver Dempsey
Tradesmen.ie
