Back in the day, when you left the house for more than just a stroll down the street, you pretty much needed to carry cash (coins and folding money) for small to medium-sized transactions, and at a lot of places (notably grocery stores) you’d need to pay by check if you didn’t have cash.
But I have no problem doing without coins and a checkbook, and from the linked thread (which didn’t have a poll), it’s clear that a lot of people manage quite well without carrying any cash at all.
So, when you’re out and about, do you or don’t you typically carry the following in your pockets/purse/etc.?
A checkbook (or loose checks)
Paper money
Coins
I’d poll for where people lived as well, if the responses to that could be crossed with the responses to the main questions. But they can’t, so just put that in comments if you feel like it.
I would get some weird looks if I bought a small bottle of coke zero with my debit card. Also, isn’t there a charge (to the shop) associated with using credit/debit cards?
I get annoyed when people in express lines at supermarkets pay with their card or cheque book.
I live in the Isle of Man.
It doesn’t bother me when people in the express lane pay with plastic - here in America, at least, it tends to be at least as fast as paying with cash, and often faster if the change is complicated. But I’d love to see them ban checks from the express lanes, and in some stores I go to, they’ve done this.
I use checks for mailing money (e.g. paying bills), but I do that from home, so I only take my checkbook out of the house on very rare occasions. When I’m out and about, I use cash for small purchases and credit cards for large ones.
Some shops have quick card machines - pop your card in, enter pin, machine says ‘transaction complete - remove card’ almost instantly.
But most shops don’t. It takes a while for the machine to process the transactions.
Having said that, It’s less annoying now that there’s chip-n-pin than when people had to sign for it.
And further less annoying than when some oblivious person stares into space RIGHT until the moment they have to pay, and then act as if they’ve been asked to do something they COMPLETELY weren’t expecting - i.e. pay. resulting in a lengthy rummage inside their overflowing bag/purse for six hundred pennies.
No coins and no checks. Between my debit card, the credit cards and a couple of twenties, I have the day covered. The only checks I’ve written in the last year were to magazines for subscriptions or donations to the World Wildlife Fund and the like.
Change makes noise, so I toss it into a pile as soon as possible, or stick it in the bucket for Jerry’s Kids.
Check book lives on the coffee table as the only time I use it is to write a check for the maid.
I throw all coins into a jar, and purge (and try to avoid spending during the day) $1s, $5s and $10s. They go into the sock drawer then the savings account.
So I tend to walk around with just folding money of the $20 variety.
Oh, I love my folding green and coins. I put the coins into one of those banks that totals them up and sends each coin into a tube ready to be wrapped. I take them to the bank every month, deposit into my checking, and there’s painless money for charities I support. (I carry a blank check in my wallet because of course I’m constantly running low on cash.) Daughter uses the debit card, of course. I once saw a statement from her bank when she was working, every day she bought a $1 bottle of water, for 30 days in a row! I thought that looked funny, but it wasn’t so funny when she forgot to put money into her account and was overdrawn, and owed like $70 in bank fees! :eek:
My debit card goes everywhere. I don’t have any checks at all.
If I do need to go to an ATM for a place that doesn’t accept debit cards, then I’ll keep cash in my pocket until it’s gone.
Since I’ve gone to debit only, I have a much better picture of my spending habits, and have saved quite a bit more money than I did when using cash only.
I’m always shocked when someone writes a check at a store.
I’m 52, so I don’t think it’s a generational thing. I think it’s weird.
One reason I stopped carrying coins was that once I started carrying a cell phone everywhere (a function of having a small kid), the easiest place to put it was the pocket where I’d carried my pocket change up to that point.
I’ve solved that problem by keeping one of those little 35mm film canisters* filled with quarters in the car. I don’t have to carry them on me, or even think about them at all, until I find myself parking at a metered space.
*Remember those? (Granddaddy, tell me about the olden days when you couldn’t see your photos right away!) I’ve kept several because they’re perfect for holding a stack of maybe 2 dozen quarters.
I carry credit with a high limit and cash sometimes from $500-1,000. I can hit the ATM for more if needed. Especially since 911, I do not want to be caught off guard without ready paper money for gas or supplies. I need street money. The coins I carry are only secondary to purchases until I can unload them.
I just use my car’s ashtray - nobody I know smokes anymore. All coin change I get usually goes in there, a tip jar or occasionally a beggar. So I carry cash, which is sometimes necessary and/or more convenient that a debit card and maybe 25% of the time a few coins. Never a paper check unless I have a very specific reason to do so.
I carry all forms of money, but that’s because I have one of those enormous chick wallets that’s bigger than your head, has a built in coin purse, a million slots for card, and a place for checks.
Hell, I hardly ever see cars with ashtrays anymore.
After 30 responses, most people (24/30) so far carry paper money, a smaller majority (17/30) carries coins, but checkbooks aren’t a popular item anymore (8/30).
Well, I don’t carry the coins deliberately, they just kind of settle at the bottom of my purse until I either switch out purses, or I accumulate enough to make my bag too heavy. Then I take them out and transfer them to a jar or something.
Even in the days before debit cards, I seldom carried checks. I’ve never purchased anything by check in an ordinary retail establishment, like a supermarket or department store, in my entire life. (I’m 50 btw.)
The paper money is actually plastic and no-one in Australia has carried a check book around for probably 20 years. i used to have one for business purposes but left it in the desk drawer.
