Redeeming unused travelers checks

They are not circulating. I will bet most of those checks are long gone. When I traveled in the fifties/sixties I always buried a couple of AE 50s in my billfold as emergency money in the days before debit cards and ATMS. Save my butt more than once especially during my undergraduate years. A few years ago when we were moving from our house of 35+ years, I found an old billfold in a desk drawer complete with a $50 AE TC, dated to about 64. -- Loved it. Bank took it with no questions asked because I deposited into my account.

Years ago, maybe a decade or too, I read an article about the huge cash float that the travel check companies had because of this common practice. The TC was an extremely profitable business. Wonder if the government has a handle on the amount of cash that disappears from the system each year?

As Frank mentioned, you can deposit them at the bank where you have your account like any other check. Simply make them out to yourself, counter sign, and endorse. This will be faster, free of any fees (unless your bank charges for deposits), and you should have almost immediate access to the funds. The only restriction, in the US, is that they are USD checks, not anything in foreign currency. Also, remote deposit of traveler cheques using a cell phone app is not supported by most banks, they need to have the cheque. The AmEx site is the best route for foreign currency checks as their fees for exchanging the cheques will be a lot less than what your bank will likely charge if they will even accept them.

I can't stress enough that you should cash any traveler cheques you have in your possession, no matter the brand, as soon as you can. They may still be sold by AmEx and retain their value forever, but they are useless when traveling outside the US and nearly so domestically. No one knows what they are anymore. Merchants don't want to take any kind of check, especially from anyone who is not a local resident, so will most likely refuse them. Banks where you have no account don't want to deal with you or them due to the large number of counterfeit ones which means the bank no way to recover the funds if the cheques are bad. If you try to spend the cheque in a foreign country and it is not in their currency, merchants will refuse them and bank won't even talk to you if you don't have an account with them.

Traveler cheques served a purpose for a very long time. You could carry whatever amount of funds with you where ever you went with no fear of loss because they were replaceable immediately at any AmEx office (if they were Amex). Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view), with the presence of ATMs on nearly every street corner and debit cards that work around the world, their time is gone. Their only use going forward should be as a display in a travel museum about how things were last century.

I’ll bet the vast majority are long gone out of circulation. I’ve heard of older relatives stashing them in books for emergencies and I bet most were tossed out or sold. If some estate appraiser tells you the collection of 1950s well read mystery novels have no value, you’re not searching through them all. I’ve never found a travellers cheque in books I’ve bought from estate sales but have gotten lots of interesting stuff used a bookmarks.

I cashed a bunch of them on a cruise ship probably ten years ago with no problem. Glad I got rid of them. This cruise ship method is obsolete for the time being though. ;-)

Our last traveler’s cheques were more than 20 years ago, in Pounds Sterling. It was handy paying for a London restaurant meal with a £75 TC, and getting some cash back as change. Dinner for 2 wasn’t even £75 back then.

Ever since then, we’ve brought back cash (Euros and/or Pounds) from trips, so that we’d have some for the next trip, but not TC’s.

To quote Karl Malden, slightly out of context, if you don’t cash in your TC now, while you still can, then when you try to cash it in later, when it’s too late, What WILL You Do? What WILL You Do?!?

Took a class a long time ago in early New England History. They were talking about how common it was for Banks (and some individuals) to issue their own currency.

At one point they mentioned a percentage (15%?) that would never be redeemed. A nice little extra profit. I imagine it's the same for anyone else who can create their own money, like these TC, like Amazon Gift Cards, others.

The issue with Traveler Cheques, unlike gift cards and coupons and other forms of privately issued currency, is they never expire and the funds have to be kept on deposit till the end of time. Even if the issuing company ceases to exist, like Thomas Cooke did, the funds are still there held in escrow to cover the outstanding checks. The holder of those funds is allowed to invest in anything they want as long as they do not lose the initial value and so do make a good profit over time.

The only time the funds are released is of course to pay a check when it comes through or when the purchaser reports it as being lost or stolen or otherwise destroyed. So if you ran across an AmEx cheque from 1800, it would still be cashable for the face value at AmEx. Of course an unused check that old would most likely be worth a lot more than face value to a collector.

When my parents came to visit my wife and I living in Spain in 1979, my dad carried travelers checks. When he passed in 1998, he still had the ones he hadn’t spent on the trip. Needless to state, they got cashed. Interesting that the federal reserve made the report since the majority of travelers checks were sold by AmEx. I wonder how it would even know how many had not be cashed.

If the funds are held in reserve, I'll bet they are earning interest for American Express. The real profit centre for AE over the years wasn't so much the fees as the short-term interest it could collect in the delay between taking in the customer's money and point of redemption. When many millions might be in transit, that could be considerable earning power.