The U.S. Treasury stopped mailing paper checks in 2025. Teen money behavior had already moved past them.

The share of U.S. bills paid by check fell 12 percentage points between 2020 and 2024, to just 7% of bill-payment transactions, and only 6% of consumers now name a check as their preferred way to pay a bill, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice.[1] Checks rank second-worst for convenience, speed, and ease of setup among every payment method the Fed tracks; only money orders rank worse.[1]

The federal government reached the same conclusion about itself: under Executive Order 14247, signed March 25, 2025, the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing paper tax-refund checks as of September 30, 2025, citing a check's odds of being lost, stolen, altered, or delayed as more than 16x higher than an electronic payment.[2]

The Treasury, which has mailed more checks than any other institution in the country, decided the paper format itself was the liability.

Check fraud risk is still very real as well. A 2024 TikTok and X trend nicknamed an "infinite money glitch" was really old-fashioned check kiting: deposit a check for more than the account holds, then withdraw the cash before the check bounces, exploiting the days-long float a paper check still requires to clear.

Teenagers' own money habits moved past paper checks even earlier, and did so without waiting for an institution to tell them. When PayPal opened a compliant Venmo account to 13-to-17-year-olds in 2023, the company said the product was catching up to existing behavior: roughly 25 million teens were already using Venmo's standard, 18-and-over app, and about a third of their parents used it too, according to PayPal senior vice president Doug Bland.[3]

The same pattern already played out in investing: a 14-year-old can now open a brokerage account and place real stock trades without a parent's ongoing approval, with no personal-finance class required first.

Cards, meanwhile, are the format built for teens directly, and they're carrying real money at scale. Greenlight, a debit card and money app for kids and teens, reported managing more than $2 billion across over 6.5 million U.S. families in its December 2025 annual family trends report.[4] Parents can get it directly, or through one of the 150-plus banks and credit unions that now offer Greenlight to their own customers as a co-branded or embedded feature inside their existing banking app.[5] Either way, that's real spending and saving moving through a card built for a 13-year-old, with no paper check ever entering the transaction.

Buy now, pay later is arriving through the same door: a debit card, not a separate loan application. Affirm reported that its own debit-style card, usable anywhere Visa is accepted, grew its active cardholder base 97% year over year to 2.3 million in the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2025, with spending on the card up 132% to $1.2 billion.[6] The card is the same on-ramp Venmo and Greenlight already built for teens, just waiting on the other side of Affirm's own 18-and-up eligibility line.

None of this makes paper checks worthless to understand. A check's account and routing numbers are the same numbers that move a P2P transfer, like Venmo, Zelle, or Cash App, or a direct deposit on payday, so a student who understands one gets the bigger picture on how money actually moves. That's worth folding into a lesson built for the digital age.

Checks, cards, and now buy-now-pay-later cards are moving on a timeline set by banks, fintechs, and a Treasury order. A financial-education curriculum that opens on paper checks is teaching last decade's economy, the same reason no one at school will teach a teenager how to use fax machines or landline phones. Staying current isn't a nice-to-have; it's what keeps a lesson relevant to the economy a student actually has to learn.

FinBizify is built to track the timeline that's actually moving: cards, P2P transfers, and whatever displaces them next.

Sources

1. "By the Numbers: Decline in Consumers' Use of Paper Checks," Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Take On Payments blog, June 2, 2025. https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/publications/take-on-payments/2025/06/02/by-the-numbers-decline-in-consumers-use-of-paper-checks

2. "Modernizing Payments To and From America's Bank Account," IRS.gov, describing Executive Order 14247 (signed March 25, 2025). https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/modernizing-payments-to-and-from-americas-bank-account

3. Doug Bland (PayPal senior vice president and general manager, Venmo), quoted in "Venmo to launch teen account," Payments Dive, May 23, 2023. https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/paypal-venmo-teen-account-p2p-payments/651002/

4. "Greenlight's Annual Family Trends Report Uncovers Bright Spot in Consumer Finance: Kids Are Building Wealth Through Investing," Greenlight ("Greenlight Glimmers" 2025 report), Business Wire, Dec. 4, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251204763975/en/Greenlights-Annual-Family-Trends-Report-Uncovers-Bright-Spot-in-Consumer-Finance-Kids-are-Building-Wealth-Through-Investing

5. "Partnerships," Greenlight. https://greenlight.com/partnerships

6. Affirm Holdings, Inc., fourth fiscal quarter 2025 shareholder letter (quarter ended June 30, 2025), filed as Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, Aug. 28, 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1820953/000182095325000078/affirmfq425designedshare.htm