Information You Should Put on a Check: Personal Finance Tips

"Hi! This is Summer on behalf of expertvillage.com in this clip I’m going to be going over how to write a check. This seems simple enough but if you just take a few extra seconds to check everything over before you actually hand the check over for payment it makes it a lot easier to make sure that the check was written out properly and that you’re not going to have any problems with that check coming back. So this is a basic check I have the information blotted out here just to protect my privacy, the top up here would be the drawer that would be you, your address, phone number, we don’t recommend putting any additional information on there other than your address in case the checkbook were lost or stolen the least information that the person that stole that checkbook has the better, so basically just your name and address, phone number if you write a lot of checks because merchants will ask for that if write checks in department stores but that’s what this information is up here the drawer. Here pay to the order of that would be considered the payee, that’s the person that’s receiving the check for payment, down here is the memo line which is optional you can use that if you want, if you make a memo on here before you hand the check over for payment basically that’s legally binding for what that memo says is if the person endorses that check they’re agreeing the payment was for whatever was written here in the memo line. The written amount line right here is actually the legal amount that the check is made out for, over here is the numerical amount that the check is written out for, if there was ever a discrepancy between the written amount and the numerical amount, the written amount is the legal amount and that’s the amount that the bank has to take legally, so say you wrote it out for one hundred fifty dollars and you only wrote $100 in the numerical amount legally the check is for $150. And then over here of course is your signature, at the bottom here this first set of numbers would be the routing number basically that identifies the bank or credit union that the check was written off of, the middle line here would your full account number and then this last number here corresponds to the check number out at the top. So those are the basic parts of a check and then we’re going to go over on the next clip how you would actually write a check out."