Question for those in banking. Why is there still a 10 day on checks.

[Crosshair]

I cashed out my stocks from work to put against my school loans. (About $6,000) I really don't use checks anymore so I was thinking that it was like electronic payment. Make a deposit/payment, wait a day for it to make its way through the system and viola. No, I have to wait 10 DAYS TO HAVE MY MONEY. In todays world are they really saying, that 10 days is the fastest they can do it in??? Can't you enter the check into the system, have the computer contact the bank the check came from and instantly draw funds from the account. If the check is rubber then freeze the account. What is so hard, am I missing something?

I'm not asking for the world, I can see a 2-3 day wait on a check that size, but are banks living in the 1980's or what? Why does it take so long??

/Thanks

[digilight]

I believe that the standard is anything over 5K gets an automatic 10 day hold.

We even had the same thing happen when we sold our condo, the remainder of the procedes got hit with a hold.

One trick that a teller told me about (not sure if it works at all banks or just the bank I was using, a big multinational huge chain) is to get the checks split up so that everything is under the limit and make multiple deposits to avoid the hold, in your case 2 $3,000 checks (I know not always possible).

And yeah, when it happened to us the first time there was much anger and cursing from us (once we got back to the car of course, not in the bank).