Australia adopted decimal currency on February 14, 1966, the year before I was born. According to Wikipedia:

“In 1965, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, a monarchist, wished to name the currency the royal. Other proposed names included more exotic suggestions such as the austral, the oz, the boomer, the roo, the kanga, the emu, the digger, the kwid, the dinkum, the ming (Menzies’ nickname). Owing to Menzies’ influence, the name royal was settled on, and trial designs were prepared and printed by the Reserve Bank of Australia. The choice of name for the currency proved unpopular, and it was later dropped in favour of the dollar.”

Here’s a design of the proposed 10 royals note:

According to the Reserve Bank website: In June 1963, with no clear consensus having emerged on a name, the Government decided to name the new currency the Royal. Treasurer Harold Holt explained that the Government saw this name as “emphasising our link with the Crown” and as being “a dignified word with a pleasing sound”.

Between June and September 1963, the Bank’s Note Printing Branch developed a variety of design concepts for the Royal notes.

Just three months after announcing the “royal” decision the Government conceded on September 19, 1963 that the name of the currency unit would be the “dollar”. This decision won quick and general public approval.

The video below was used to promote the changeover from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency. The old coins remained legal tender until February 1967, but continued to appear in currency for many years afterwards.

I recall obtaining sixpence and shilling coins in change up until the late 1970s.

At secondary school we were taught how to write cheques. For my parents it was the main way of paying bills and using cheques seemed a natural thing to do.

When I ran my own business in the mid to late 90s, I used cheques extensively, but gradually switched to credit cards for fuel and Bpay or direct debit for regular expenses.

Today I hardly ever write cheques and my younger kids probably won’t be taught about them.

A 2008 study led by Professor Margaret Jackson, Killing the Cheque, concluded that cheque usage was continuing to decline in Australia.

“In particular, there appears to have been a significant decline in the use of cheque by businesses to pay suppliers and bills. All the businesses interviewed accepted EFT payments and EFT was the preferred payment channel, despite notification issues.”

A 2010 report by the Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) said: “For the last 10 years, the use of cheques in Australia has been declining steadily as consumers have access to a greater range of more convenient payment options … the marked decline in cheque use strongly suggests the future direction of cheques will need to be managed.”

The total number of cheques in use in Australia has dropped from 437 million in 2006 to 276 million in 2010.? Reserve Bank of Australia figures show that cheque use in Australia has declined by more than 35 percent in the last four years.

Earlier this year, the APCA announced a public consultation process to gather community views on the future direction of cheques in Australia.

Recent research found that 75 percent of consumers do not use cheques at all. However, five percent of Australians believe they would have a major problem finding an alternative to using cheques. These consumers are predominantly the elderly, rurally isolated and unwaged.

The APCA says cheques are in “irreversible decline”, which sounds like code for “on the way out”.

The consultation paper and submissions are online here.

There was concern the not-for-profit sector and pensioners may be adversely impacted. In the United Kingdom, the Payments Council proposed phasing out cheques by 2018.

The UK Government has argued that alternatives to cheques must be acceptable to small business and charities and that if cheques are abolished the Payments Council must introduce a paper-based replacement for them.

Personally, I have no problem with cheques being abolished, providing equivalent bank services are accessible and affordable for people on low incomes.

But this submission (below) clearly outlines why a transition period will be needed before cheques are phased out (if that’s to be the case):

In fact I have two accountants. One in Myrtleford handles my company affairs and I have one in Mount Gambier for my personal tax returns.

I shifted my personal business to a local accountant because I wanted to see him, to be sure he was real.

There’s nothing wrong with my Myrtleford accountant; he does a good job as far as I can tell. I’d be able to claim a deduction for his fee if he prepared my personal return, but it’s not the same having a remote relationship.

I guess it’s like other relationships. I don’t know how Delmer copes having his wife and new kids in Canada while he’s in Ohio.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I didn’t find that was true with my Victorian accountant.

The guy in Mount Gambier doesn’t look like the accountant pictured above.

I guess you’d say he’s fairly typical of the breed: white, middle aged (older than me) with grey hair. He wears a conservative long-sleeve shirt and a tie.

I wouldn’t like my accountant to wear a Hawaiian shirt or anything outlandish. He should look businesslike and able to stare down an auditor.

It’s strange that I only see him once a year. Mount Gambier isn’t all that big, just 25,000 people. I guess accountants don’t go to the supermarket or the football. In their spare time they probably go train spotting or collecting insects for a university.

Not that my accountant is boring. He has a good grasp of local affairs and seems interested in what’s going on outside his office.

For all I know he might go parachuting on the weekends or scuba diving down one of the nearby sinkholes.

You can’t get to know a person if you only meet them once a year.

I feel I know people like Delmer, Ebony and Sue better than the accountant, even though I’ve never met them.

But it’s better seeing the accountant once a year than never.

You need to see someone to trust them with your money.

I should get a big enough refund this year to pay off one of the credit cards, just before Christmas hits the wallet again.

Using electronic banking I accidentally did it the wrong way round, and transferred from Mastercard to the savings account.

I immediately moved the money back again to the correct account.

Today I saw that Westpac charged me $16.06 for a cash advance from the credit card.

What a rip-off!

I suppose I could ring the bank and try my luck at getting it reversed, and if time permits I’ll do that tomorrow.

However, the cash advance fee should not be that high for an electronic transfer. There’s no way it could cost the bank that much.

I have a linked transaction account, into which my wages are paid and from which several direct debits are made.

I also have a linked high-interest savings account. Both Ready Credit and the transaction account have a cheque book facility.

I have appreciated the fact I don’t pay any monthly fees and ATM withdrawals are free from any bank’s automatic teller machine. That’s about to change.

According to an email I received from Citibank today:

Following a review by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), from 3 March 2009 ATM Direct Charging will be introduced at all ATMs across Australia.

ATM Direct Charging will now mean the fee charged for using an ATM will be displayed and charged by the ATM owner at the time of completing a transaction at their ATM. This ATM Direct Charge will then be displayed as a separate item on your account statement.

Whereas currently Citi pays the fee for our customers to use another bank’s ATM in Australia, from 3 March 2009 the ATM owner may charge you.

It sounds like the Reserve Bank had good intent in wanting transaction fees to be transparent, however a possibly unintended consequence is that banks which paid other banks for the service, and their customers, have been left exposed.

Citibank has come up with this solution:

Citi has entered into a partnership with Westpac, which will continue to give you access to over 1700 fee-free ATMs Australia wide. When using a Westpac-branded ATM no ATM Direct Charge will be displayed on the screen. All Citi ATMs will also be fee-free.

And, contrary to many banks in Australia Citi also maintains our commitment to not charge our customers any additional “other bank’s” ATM processing fees when using another bank’s ATM.

I don’t quite get the last bit. Westpac ATMs won’t display the surcharge. Other banks will, but Citibank won’t charge for them?

But further down it sounds like Citibank customers will be charged for using non-Westpac ATMs: “Citi recognises that you will be charged directly by ATM owners for using non-Citi and non-Westpac-branded ATMs and so these transactions will not count towards your allocated number of fee-free withdrawals per month.”

The universal fee-free flexibility of Citibank cards was a key attraction, but I’m happy enough to use Westpac machines.

It’s interesting the deal has been struck with Westpac. I am able to deposit cheques to my Citibank accounts via the National Australia Bank, so it would have made more sense for the arrangements to have been worked out with NAB.

I guess they didn’t want to play along at the right price.

Financial commentators refer to the last recession as being beyond the memory of Generation Y (the “me” generation who have everything they want) and question their ability to cope.

They might be right about that. I’m not sure my generation have much to learn from the early 90s though either.

I was 24 in 1991. I had a secure job and no debts. I deposited money in the bank and remember getting 19 percent interest on three-month term deposits.

At the same time my parents were probably paying nearly 20 percent on their mortgage.

Yes, I had to adjust slightly. My application for a car loan was knocked back for no obvious reason.

And after I returned from a four-month overseas trip in 1992 I found my job redundant. However, my employer relocated me to Melbourne on an equivalent salary.

I paid $130 a week to rent a three-bedroom house in West Preston. That was the only year I have ever lived in a capital city.

To rent a similar house today would cost at least $300 a week. That’s an increase of 130 percent.

I estimate salaries have only risen about 50 percent in the same time.

I’m wary of the current recession, not because I fear the consequences for myself, but that I have responsibilities to others.

As an individual, if things got tight I would just move somewhere else.

As the father of four children aged 4-14 you have to weigh up a whole lot of other issues.

I’m not really worried about the economic situation. My job is secure and Mount Gambier is more resilient than other places because of the diversity of the local economy.

It’s something to think about though.

A bit of a hassle, but I followed the prompts, identified myself and got through to someone after about five minutes.

They wanted to check that a Mastercard transaction was legitimate.

It was A$38 to Yahoo! Because it had been entered manually and seemed suspicious, they were checking if I had authorised it.

I renewed my Flickr Pro account this afternoon, so the transaction was correct.

I appreciated the fact Westpac bothered to check with me, especially over a relatively small amount, and told the girl that. I hope they call to verify if someone dodgy tries to bill me for several hundred dollars or more!

The surprise of the whole matter was the arse falling out of the Australian dollar.

The amount I authorised was US$25. I just checked the exchange rate and the Aussie dollar is only fetching 65 US cents. They were near parity a few months ago.

I received a letter from Citibank this week offering to increase my credit limit incrementally from $20,000 to $50,000.

“In recognition of your excellent repayment record we are delighted to offer you further periodical increases up to a pre-approved credit limit,” the bank writes.

“We would like to make it quick and easy for you to accept credit limit increases by introducing a new account feature.

“This means you no longer need to call or mail us each time you want to take up a credit limit increase in the future.”

I’ve never asked for a credit limit increase, but they have bumped it up for me a few times through written offers like this one.

It surprises me, given media reports that banks are tightening their lending procedures and credit is supposedly harder to get.

That meant I fortunately missed the first half of the stock market downturn and probably saved a few thousand dollars.

I opened the new account with about $78,000. It’s worth the same today, even though employer contributions have been going in now for a few months.

It will probably be worth less next week when the recent share market turmoil washes through.

I just changed the asset allocation to bump up the cash component from 10 percent to 50 percent. The cash return is currently 7.4 percent.

It might be a year or more before shares offer the same level of return.

I had only been in the workforce a couple of years when compulsory super was introduced, about 1988 I think.

There were a few years I had my own business when not much was contributed.

Near enough to $80,000 in 20 years is pretty good, I suppose. Without compulsory super it’s almost certain I would not have saved that much.

I checked the prices today after hearing the Dow dropped 358 points overnight.

Westpac is down to $20.69, WA Newspapers to $8.48 and Cortona Resources to 18 cents. Most people won’t have heard of Cortona.

They have some prospective gold tenements near Kalgoorlie and in New South Wales. The price climbed above 50 cents at one stage. I sold them in the low 40s and mid 30s.

If I hadn’t sold them we wouldn’t have been able to afford the house deposit.

As far as I know there is no reason for the price decline other than sentiment and people wanting cash.