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Comment by dcroley | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this idea will age. I haven't been to a bank branch in so long. Hell, I've written 5 checks in the last 2 years. I deposit the rare check with my phone or ATM. Why would I want to go to a branch? I took out my last mortgage with my credit union and still never when in the branch. My 20-something daughter never considered branch locations at all when picking her new bank.

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I do most business in cash and drop by the branch every week to get some.

It’s downstairs from my office and pretty quick.

I get it - I’m weird. But even weirder is that the bank branch sometimes have money! More than a couple thousand dollars is sometimes too much.

better yet - don't apologize for using cash

Cash. I have used a branchless bank for much of my banking, but it is still useful to keep an account open with a branched bank for the times that I need to do transactions with amounts of cash that are larger than ATM limits.

Yep, cash. Especially in the age of: 1) robo-support with pre-defined assistance paths that are engineered precisely to avoid servicing the types of issues you will run into at critical moments, and 2) banks / money processing services cutting you off with no warning.

I asked my bank a while back to send me a new card as I regularly do when the current card gets worn out and starts to more frequently fail chip/strip readers, and it got lost in transit. I requested them to send me another; however, this time they had marked my old card having been lost/stolen and closed the debit account.

Not wanting to struggle with finding a friend both actually having money to spare and willing to engage in some attentive coordination, I was effectively cut off from _all_ of my cash, as far as I could see. I'm not particularly familiar with all the money movement mechanisms.

I had to make the effort to get to the bank the next day during business hours (I am a night owl and work full time), and I withdrew a good chunk of cash to hold me over while waiting for my card, which finally arrived yesterday.

Yadda yadda, something something don't put all your eggs in one basket. Yes, I know. I have only on the order of months been making enough to be able to entertain sharding off more than negligible amounts into a secondary account. It is on the to-do list.

The last time I wrote a cheque was in the early 90s I think.

My landlord requires payment by check every month. Mountain View, Silicon Valley.

Banks don't even issue chequebooks here (Norway).

We just transfer money directly to bank accounts, or pay by direct debit, or electronic invoice. For paying small amounts (up to about 500 USD) we have a Scandinavian mobile app called Vipps that lets private individuals pay other people just by knowing their mobile number.

All these things are free to use but using a cheque costs money.

Deposit today morning and yesterday evenings revenue.

Deposit cheques in business account.

Have a personal conversation with manager about that loan and thank him.

Get heads-up if some cheque you issued might bounce and deposit money tomorrow.

Meet friends you made at bank as you have been visiting it for the last 40 years.

I have to go every month or so to get quarters for laundry. Ever since covid started they have limits on the number of quarters I can get per trip. There's no change machine in the laundry room in my apartment building. This is Mountain View, Silicon Valley.

This is true. I still have my accounts with a credit union in California, even though I’ve lived in Chicago for the last 11½ years.

I still have checks left in the checkbook I used, 20 years ago, to pay my first month's rent for my apartment.

Meeting with a banker face-to-face can often work better if your situation is in any way unusual or complicated. The definition of "unusual" might not be what the reader would expect.

For example, the process to open a new account at SMBC (one of the three largest banks in Japan) can be done entirely online, unless the customer has a middle name. Why? Probably some ancient COBOL program that can only be bypassed by hand-verifying the customer's info.

Same. I'm 44. I haven't been in a physical bank branch since I was 16.

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