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.
Several people have noted that it’s more difficult to give money to buskers/beggars etc, but no-one seems to have pointed out that a cashless society could make it very difficult for them in more ways than that.
If cashless shops become common, how do recipients of your donation spend it? How easy is it to even get a bank account and a card without a fixed address? And while tax-dodging companies obviously prefer cash, some of the same issues can apply to the very poor- even if they do have a way to get electronic payments what happens if they get some income-based benefits and someone gives them just enough money to put them over a threshold?
And people who don’t want to shift aren’t always just stubborn, some may have real trouble switching. People with no phone, no computer, been using cash their whole lives… I used to work retail near a residential care home for people with severe learning disabilities- some regulars would come in almost every day with their handful of pocket money, get us to count it and then help them pick sweets that they could buy. How does that work in a cashless society? Do they need an app? Can everyone even use a phone? Or do people in that situation just have to lose that bit of independence?
Sure, for the comfortable in society, cashless is fine and convenient and the bit of a loss of privacy probably isn’t a huge deal for most people, but for the really vulnerable losing the option of cash could have major downsides.
Prepaid debit card. You go into a store and buy one with cash or load an existing one. Or you put your cash into a reverse ATM and it puts the money onto the prepaid debit card. The first option you can do all over. The second is less common.
Over here, the major banks have to offer a “basic” bank account. This is because the government wants to pay benefits by bank transfer. These accounts have no frills and cannot be overdrawn.
An address is required, but all that needs to be is somewhere they can send letters to.
Use Venmo. If Venmo is good enough for every school fund raiser, food cart, and pop-up street fair vendor, I think some dude playing John Mayer covers on the subway can work it out.
Strip clubs is another matter. part of the experience of going to a strip club is tossing singles on the stage and slipping a $20 into her g-string to give your buddy a lap dance. Scanning QR code tattooed (presumably temporarily) on her butt feels a bit dehumanizing IMHO.