Four Common Illegal Financial Habits

Whether it's signing your spouse's name to a document or transferring money on his behalf, these money shortcuts can get you into trouble. Break these nasty money habits today!

It's so tempting! In our rush to get everything done in a day, it is easy to try to take a short cut here or there in our financial lives. It seems harmless and simply expedient. However, whether it's signing your spouse's name to a document or transferring money on his behalf, these money shortcuts can get you into trouble. All of them are prosecutable and, although it doesn't often happen for a first offense, these are nasty money habits to break today.
1. Signing your spouse's signature
Many of us have been in this tempting situation. You need to get something signed by both spouses and off in the mail and your spouse is at work. After years of marriage, you may be pretty skilled at copying his signature. It would be so easy to sign on behalf of both of you to be able to check the task off of your list. Don't do it! Forging a signature on a check or other legal document is a crime in all 50 states and can even be a federal felony, depending on the circumstances.
Even with your spouse's verbal approval, you cannot sign documents on his or her behalf. If your spouse is incapable of signing documents due to injury or illness, you should speak to a lawyer about obtaining power of attorney over your spouse's affairs. This gives you the legal right to transact on his or her behalf.
2. Writing post-dated checks
There are many day-to-day financial situations in which we are asked to provide someone with post-dated checks. It may be post-dating checks for the upcoming year of rental payments or for monthly payments on installment loans. But did you know that it is technically illegal to write post-dated checks if you do not have the funds in your account today?
Banks can negotiate checks at any time as long as they are signed, regardless of the date on them. As a courtesy, most banks require tellers to review dates if checks are presented at the counter and may reject them if they are post-dated. If a check is deposited as part of a night deposit or other bulk deposit, however, it is more likely to go through. While writers of post-dated checks are rarely prosecuted for writing "bad" checks, it can muddle up your cash flow significantly if someone decides to cash all of your checks at once.
3. Kiting
Kiting is a form of check fraud that can have extremely serious legal consequences. It consists of taking advantage of the banking system's time to clear manual checks through its system. This clearing time is called the "float". Let's look at an example. If you have two bank accounts at two different banks and you write yourself a check from one account (which does not currently have the funds to cover the check) to your other account, you will show the deposited funds in the receiving account before the check tries to clear the other account. You could then, technically, write a check from the second account back to the first account to cover the initial transaction. It is basically illegally borrowing money. Those who wish to defraud banks will never cover the amount of the deposit and this is an entirely different level of fraud.
Most people who kite, however, are simply trying to juggle not enough funds until payday. Because the money is non-existent, however, it is considered check fraud. Kiting can attract lengthy prison terms. The moral of the story is do not write checks if you don't have the funds immediately to cover them.
4. Signing on to someone else's online banking profile
This is another tempting practice if you are the spouse in charge of handling the finances and your spouse is often unavailable. Signing on to someone's banking profile using their online ID and password is fraud. You would not be able to walk into a bank branch and withdraw money from your spouse's account unless you had signing authority set up in advance. The same holds true for online banking. Any time you impersonate someone else in a legal or banking transaction, you can be subject to prosecution. Planning financial transactions ahead can reduce the temptation to commit this crime.