I do bookkeeping for small businesses. A lot of our clients make substantial purchases in cash. One particular client regularly spends over $1000 in cash in individual transactions, making bulk food purchases for their restaurant.
They do this largely because they receive a lot of cash in the normal course of business and it’s easier to just spend it than to try to keep track of how much they have in the bank at any given time. The aforementioned client used to write a lot more checks, but they kept bouncing, and now many of their vendors won’t accept their checks anymore.
Canada has a million dollar coin. It is 100 kg of .99999 pure gold. See: Canadian Gold Maple Leaf - Wikipedia. There are also smaller gold coins. I have never seen one except when I toured the mint.
I once held a US $10,000 bill. An uncle had it in his billfold. I have no idea why.
In 1967, I spent 6 months visiting the ETH in Zurich. I was paid Fr 1500 a month (about $350, but more like $2500 today). Every month, I got a voucher, went to the cashier and received Fr 1000 and Fr 500 notes, which I took to my bank and deposited them, then withdrew enough for rent and then gradually over the month. But they were used to dealing with large bills.
I can’t think of a worse situation where one can bring large amounts of cash.
When I bought a car, I took $9,000 in cash out of the bank and they made me sign a waiver acknowledging that I could be mugged in the parking lot. I thought better of the situation and got a $9,000 cashier’s check instead. $10k in cash is trivially easy to carry, it fits in a pocket, anything more than that and you really should be going non-cash if it’s at all possible.
Believe me, we advise all our clients to do things the “right” way, but we don’t control them. We tend to cater to a customer base that, buy their nature, no other bookkeepers are willing to work for… for obvious reasons.
In the book Wiseguy (the basis for the movie Goodfellas), Henry Hill mentioned a bookmaker that would cleverly deal with short term cash flow problems by keeping a bunch of $1,000 (IIRC) bills to offer for payouts to big winners, who would want nothing to do with them due to the difficulty of passing them on discretely, instead opting to come back at a later date when the bookie would have smaller bills, allowing him to buy some time and come up with the money.
By the way, Henry Hill died last year, so if you see him be extra careful since this would mean that he’s a Zombie!
