Deciding When To Place A Stop Payment On A Lost Check

Several years ago I mailed a check for deposit to my brokerage account, and it was never received by the broker. After a month I decided to pay for a stop payment on that check. Sometimes those stop payments can be a waste of money if the checks aren't really lost. This Len Penzo blog post has an amusing story of how he almost wasted $40 on stop payments on two checks that he thought were lost.