My finances are mostly automated at this point. I buy most things with my card. The card is automatically paid off each month as are most of my bills. My paycheck is direct deposited to my checking account. My checking account has overdraft protection that pulls money from my savings account with no charge, My bank covers ATM fees no matter what ATM I use. Mostly I just get automated alerts telling me what’s happening. I’ll also manually review my finances in Quicken once a month to make sure nothing is amiss.
But yeah, a lot of it is “magic”. Out spending is pretty regular so I generally have to do much unless I’m making a large one-off purchase.
I have to say - I’m surprised. Didn’t your country have a slight bout of inflation a while ago? Because mine had quite a lot in the mid-1980s, when I was just old enough to start using money, and I learned very quickly that cash can lose its value on a daily basis. Even now, every time I have some in my wallet I feel like I’m losing money.
Ha, which country? I have three nationalities, and while I am concerned with inflation rates in both the UK and (higher) in South Africa, I fortunately left Zimbabwe just as everything went insane.
But I was (semi-legally) being paid in US$ at that point, so the currency crisis largely severely affected the poor working classes, was an irritation to the middle classes, and the guys at the top with government connections madeout like the bandits they are…
My mother lost everything, though. My brother, sister and I chose to donate our shares of an inheritance from a fairly wealthy grandmother in the UK, pounds sterling, so she could retire here in South Africa.
ISTM that if the government/central banks actually roll out decent digital cash, that corps like Visa/Bank of America, Apple, et al. stand to lose out. There must surely be some machinations afoot…
The kind where everyone overdraws their account and goes on a spending spree. Salaries were safe - they were linked to the CPI. So long as you didn’t try to save any of the money you were OK, at least for a while.