

In other words, carelessness.īut you’ve done the job and what you have to show for it is a check marked NSF. Geri Detweiler provides a list of them in “What You Need to Know About Bounced Checks,” including not balancing the checkbook or forgetting to account for expenditures or withdrawals. The fact is, however, that it’s far more likely that the account is active and simply doesn’t contain enough money in it to cover a check for $5,000.Ĭhecks bounce for many different reasons. And it’s possible that your client may have made a mistake. As Rebecca Lake points out in “ Bank Account Closed? 5 Things You Must Do Next,” banks close accounts for various reasons, such as a record of bounced checks, a frequent negative balance, or due to inactivity.Ĭraig Berman notes in “ What to Do If Someone Writes a Check Against a Closed Bank Account,” that writing a check against a closed account is illegal, and the consequences for the rubber check writer could include either civil action or criminal prosecution.īut you simply want your money. But if that check failed to clear because the account has been closed, your problem may be more complicated than figuring out when to redeposit it. Someone writing you a check that fails to clear is obviously at fault somewhere down the line. Today, the withdrawal of those funds could happen within hours. In the old days, someone could write a check and safely assume that three or four days would elapse before the funds were actually withdrawn. In fact, bounced checks happen more often today due to electronic check clearing, which means banks don’t have to process the paper check but can work from a digital copy. It doesn’t happen every day or every week, but it will happen from time to time. Two weeks later, it comes back from the bank, along with a letter, marked NSF-Non-Sufficient Funds. So let’s say the job’s done and you’ve collected the last $5,000 on a $15,000 re-shingling job. If your exterior replacement contracting company is typical, you engage in the standard industry practice of collecting a third of the cost of the job when it’s sold-as a deposit-another third when the job starts, and the balance when the job’s complete, inspected, and OK'ed by your foreman and that homeowner.
