Here’s a non-election, non-flu-based warning.

Beware of floating that check.

For anybody who’s had to worry about cash flow – or perhaps exaggerated that old saw about the check being in the mail – the electronic age has caught up with you.

A new federal law, which went into effect Thursday, will speed up check transactions. When somebody uses a check to pay a bill, there will be less time before the money is taken out of his or her account.

It’s something else we can blame on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. When airplanes were grounded after the attacks, banks weren’t able to move checks around by air. Transactions were slowed.

Banks had already been moving in the electronic direction. It’s a lot cheaper to send a data image of a check from computer to computer than to sort and ship huge quantities of paper checks.

For consumers, the drawbacks are obvious. The grace period between a bill being paid and the money being withdrawn from your account will shorten. That could translate into more bounced checks – and banks assessing more penalties and fees.

It also means that there will be less time for people to put a stop on problem checks, and it will take a while for security precautions to catch up with the technology, opening the door for possible fraud.

So, as a word of caution, when you pay with a check, understand that it could be processed in a matter of minutes or hours just like a debit card.

This could be the end of the check.