A friend of mine was in a spot and needed to borrow a few dollars. I felt the need to help her out, so I wrote a check for her to take to her bank. I assumed she would deposit my check and write a couple checks from her account to pay the bills. But it turns out that she does not have a bank account and needed to cash the check at my bank so she could buy money orders to pay her bills. Well, that didn’t turn out so good, as there are no local branches of my bank anywhere around where she lives. She had to give me back my uncashed check and just borrow money from a neighbor who had cash in hand.
That’s very frustrating – you would think that in today’s world there would be a better system of making places available to take care of your money matters.