agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Annie: I'm close to my nephews, one of whom recently married. The year before the wedding, during its planning, I told the couple that I would like to gift them their honeymoon to their choice destination, Greece, as their wedding present. They were thrilled. I gave them a check several months prior to the wedding to ensure they'd have any needed funds for deposits, airfare, etc., and told them it was fine to cash the check at that time.

I've since asked them to cash the check multiple times; the wedding and honeymoon having come and gone. My intended gift was the honeymoon, and my funds were not used for that.

I didn't intend to gift them a large sum for them to pay other expenses whenever they wanted. It's disconcerting not knowing when the sum will clear my account. Is this a generational thing? What is appropriate at this point? Just wait it out? -- Confused

Dear Confused: There is not much to be confused about. They are very clearly acting inappropriately and ungrateful. Your gift was very generous and thoughtful, two qualities it seems that the recent bride and groom are lacking. The gift of giving someone an experience is very thoughtful.

The next step would be to call your nephew and simply ask him when and how he plans to use the money. When you call, keep in mind that they did just get married and are probably very busy, but it is certainly not too much to follow up and ask about your gift. Best of luck to you.

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1. A wedding is not a charity, and your gift is not a donation. The recipients are not obligated to use your gift as you see fit.

2. Money is fungible anyway.

3. If this is really distressing LW, then they should call Nephew and say "I don't think you understand how much this is really distressing me. If you're not going to cash the check by this weekend I'd like to cancel it, stop the payment, and give you the same amount as cash/paypal/venmo" and then go ahead and do it.

To me, the issue is less about what exactly they're using the money for, and more about the fact that they're just hanging on to the cheque:

"I didn't intend to gift them a large sum for them to pay other expenses whenever they wanted."

I assume it works similarly in other countries as in the UK: you just write whatever figure you like on the cheque, and it isn't recorded or reserved or set aside or known about by anyone but yourself and the recipient until it has been cashed. Unless it's vastly different in other countries, then, the LW is concerned about when that draw on their account might hit -- which could be any time, and is probably a substantial amount of money (if it was intended for the use described). For most people, not knowing when or if someone might take a substantial amount of money is a problem.

Yes, that is how it works in the US as well.

It has nothing to do with whether they used it for the honeymoon or not, but hanging on to a personal check, that was a gift, for a long period of time is impolite - since, as you mentioned, you're waiting for it to clear your account, without knowing if or when it will, which can make your own bookkeeping and budgeting a lot harder. I was always taught that a birthday check needed to be cashed within a month at the *latest* to not be dreadfully impolite, and this sounds like a much bigger thing.

(A few weeks can happen, months and months is too much.)

That said, young people these days often don't handle personal checks very much, and this may not have come up for them before. You say you've spoken with them before but you don't say how they responded (did they? did they just say they would do it soon?)

If you haven't mentioned that not having that check cashed is a personal inconvenience for you, you should explain that (they probably don't know what balancing a checkbook even is!), possibly couched in terms of being worried that it went astray and being willing to cancel & reissue if something happened to the first check, so that you can clear your books and stop worrying about that check.

Do not ask them why they didn't use it for the honeymoon. That's not your business. In fact, make it clear to them that they don't have to use it for the honeymoon, you just want to see them get a good start in their marriage (It's also possible that the reason they haven't cashed it is that they're feeling awkward about the fact that they *didn't* use it for the honeymoon - perhaps something else came up, perhaps they did in fact lose track of it among the wedding planning - so you should clear the air on that too.)

Yeah, I agree - it wouldn't occur to everyone that money still being in your account would be stressful.

It might not even occur to them that the money is still in her account; I know a lot of people in their early '20s who have never used or received a paper check. If they're thinking of it in terms of the direct deposit/money transfer/auto bill pay sort of things that are often used instead nowadays, they may have just assumed that once she wrote the check the money was out of her account. (And that if they lost the check, the money was gone.)

Well said. I had much the same opinion but your take on it is much more complete.

Yeah, it would drive me COMPLETELY BUGFUCK for people to hang onto a check longer than a week or so. SO upsetting.

People not cashing checks in a timely manner is super annoying and stressful, especially if it's like, thousands of dollars. But yeah, just talk to them? Ask them to cash/deposit it or say you're cancelling it & sending a bank transfer (or whatever).

On the honeymoon like...................... it's not like "check from auntie/uncle/unknown gender-neutral variant" money is somehow Different from other money? Like if they deposited it on time & took the honeymoon... it's all the same money from the same account? So this part is weird and LW should let it go...

Edited (made a gendered assumption :() 2023-08-23 23:27 (UTC)

My immediate thought was that money is fungible. I can see LW being annoyed if they had said "here, we'll pay for your honeymoon trip to Greece" and then had a much lower-key honeymoon and spent the money on something else, depending on what the something else was. I can think of a lot of other reasonable things to spend the money on instead of a trip to Greece, such as a different trip, unexpected medical bills, or roof repairs.

I was expecting something like "I wanted to give them a honeymoon, not to pay for someone else's trip to Hawaii," or even "I wanted them to spend it, not save it." Not "I wanted to pay for their honeymoon beforehand, not to pay other bills after they bought their own tickets to Greece."

Yeah, I was expecting something like ... LW says "here's a big check for a grand honeymoon in Greece! Only for that, now, no spending it on Opposite Politics to Mine!"; but the couple takes a humble honeymoon they'd already planned and budgeted and donates the big-check amount to The Society of Opposing LW's Politics. I can see being irked about that (but gifts are gifts and can't be controlled once given).

But the check was never cashed! Money is fungible! If the check does get cashed, and if they went on the trip, it effectively still paid for the trip!

(My suspicion is that the check was in a card, the card got recycled, and the couple is too embarrassed to admit they've lost it.)

(My suspicion is that the check was in a card, the card got recycled, and the couple is too embarrassed to admit they've lost it.)

Exactly this. It's bizarre that this possibility doesn't seem to have occurred to the columnist.

The only thing I can think of that might reflect badly on them even a little bit is if several different relatives independently offered to pay for a honeymoon in Greece, and they accepted the money from all of them, and now they're stuck trying to figure out how to deal with that.

Like, if they accepted Auntie's check, and then FotB said "Oh I must pay for your honeymoon, like I've been promising since you were a little girl! Give me your dates so I can buy your plane tickets, and you can put all your hotel reservations on my credit card" and you don't say no to FotB, and then they were stuck holding Auntie's check with the trip taken out of their hands and now what---

But even then, they didn't cash the check! The worst they might have done is not 'fessed up to an awkward situation as quickly as they could have (and not cashed a personal check promptly).

Money is fungible, the LW’s only legitimate grievance is the couple not cashing/depositing the check.

And, yeah, just check in about it nonjudgmentally, and offer to cancel it and send a replacement if the physical check got lost.

I'm really surprised at the emphasis everyone else is reading into this. Like, I'm reading:

"I didn't intend to gift them a large sum for them to pay other expenses whenever they wanted."

Other people seem to be reading:

"I didn't intend to gift them a large sum for them to pay other expenses whenever they wanted."

To me, the "whenever they wanted" is the key here. The LW gave them a gift expecting the draw on their account to be imminent (because it was a gift with a purpose). That didn't happen. The LW is sitting around with a large amount of money doing nothing. Possibly it's not in an account that can earn interest; possibly it's mucking up their accounting for other bills that come out of that account. It's just awkward: at what point do you think, "well, they're never going to take the money", and do something else with it? When you don't know what someone is intending to use the money for, how do you predict when the funds are going to be taken?

The reply from Annie takes it too far, but the LW isn't out of line to want to know when someone's going to cash a cheque. My grandparents were always the same, and as an adult I agree: if I used cheques, I'd expect them to be cashed promptly.

Edited 2023-08-23 23:52 (UTC)

I think most of us agree with you with varying amounts of emphasis

How nephew and nibling-in-law use the money is none of LW's business, and LW should not ask them what they're going to use the money for if they didn't use it for the honeymoon up front.

However, whether they cash the check? That is very much LW's business. Right now, LW's account balance doesn't reflect the amount they actually have available, and LW has to do extra work to see whether they're going to drop below a minimum balance or overdraw.

...Checks expire after six months if you don't cash/deposit them.

Apparently per Dr Duckduckgo, banks may accept them if they want to after that.

But otherwise. Yeah. If that check is more than six months old, the bank may not accept it anyway. And since the wedding and honeymoon have come and gone, I suspect it's been six months.

I Did Not Know That. Thank you!

I thought it was a year, but yeah, that was my thought, too. Like honestly, these people probably have not written a check before and are not familiar with the ins and outs. Even their paycheck is probably direct deposit, so they might not have much experience with receiving checks, either. That's just how it is these days. I get the LW's frustration, but I think they need to start from the point of explaining how checks work to them. They probably think that the money is already transfered and they can just hang on to this piece of paper until whenever they're ready to use it.

Yeah. I didn't know that about checks!

A lot of checks issued by, e.g. payroll processing companies have printed right on them NOT VALID AFTER 180 DAYS FROM ISSUANCE

It's not just young people who forget to cash checks.

I am an Old who has had several checkbooks. I am also a person who once got a reimbursement check from a health insurance company, put it somewhere safe, and forgot about it until the insurance company sent me a replacement check in a letter asking me to please cash it, for the sake of their accounting department and records. Apparently, it was Not Good for them to have outstanding payments that they had agreed/admitted they actually owed someone.

This wasn't a "honeymoon in Greece" amount of money, but it wasn't trivial either. But somehow I put that one check in my sock drawer, rather than depositing it within a few days after it arrived.

1. Holding onto the check is thoughtless.

2. That said, how hard is, "Because they had this money, they could spend savings on the honeymoon knowing it would be replaced with the check"?

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