Someone cashed a cheque I wrote 17 months ago - don't they expire after 6 months?

Manxman_in_exile

Ah.  That's interesting.  I hadn't thought of it like that.  Hmmm.

ThisnotThat

Manxman_in_exile said:

Ah.  That's interesting.  I hadn't thought of it like that.  Hmmm.

There's probably the caveat that cash (except in certain denominations) extinguishes the debt so realistically that scenario wouldn't happen.  If they had given you cash there would be no debt but perhaps let's take it to the extreme extreme and assume you were sat on £1000 worth of out of date pennies.

Undervalued

Manxman_in_exile said:

Thanks.  So you would agree that after six years a payee would have no way of legally "enforcing" payment - so it is an even stronger proposition therefore that a cheque that is over six years old could not be legally "enforced" either - so a cheque is not like "cash" in that respect?

(The six months thing has already been done to death earlier in the thread and I don't think it's relevant to my question.  Ditto whether banks may or may not have a policy of voluntarily honouring cheques after any length of time)

A debt is owed for ever, it doesn't magically disappear at six years.

Whilst there may be no legal way of forcing payment, the person owed the money can still tell everybody who will listen that the debtor is a rogue who doesn't pay people! Potential creditors can take that into account in deciding whether to lend to the individual in the future. 

Manxman_in_exile

Yeah.  But I'm talking purely about "legal" enforcement - nothing else is relevant to my question... 

Brie

All comments about expiry dates aside....the reason an old cheque can be cashed is that probably no one has looked at it. 

It used to be that someone would look at the cheque being presented when depositied, match it against the depositers name and account number, check that it wasn't "stale-dated" (aka over 6 months) and then stamp it as money received at which point it was returned to the payers bank to be sent off to them with the rest of the cheques the had written along with their monthly bank statement.  (years back I did a stint for a London council filing their cashed cheques....boring job)

Now fancy-schmancy IT programmes read a stack of cheques zipped through a machine that notes the account number and amount and magically the money is moved.  The date is not longer considered relevant.