Suffice it to say, I've been seriously considering the tradeoffs of hoarding cash under my mattress.
Although, I still personally believe that coins at least up to the US quarter should probably be abolished. Quarters are really the only thing semi useful as a medium of exchange, and even they are starting to lose their utility. Maybe dollar coins can still be useful.
The US probably could get by with just $1 and $5 coins.
Metal coins seem like a case of holding onto tradition despite losing the original reason for the tradition.
Plus, quarters are better to flip to make decisions than bills.
They're also much easier to handle when you need many different ones, like when you're trying to assemble an exact amount. I can just look into my wallet and pick out the coins I need, whereas with notes, I'd have to spread them out like an awkward floppy hand of cards and especially if they weren't distinct enough scanning through and finding the right ones sounds plain annoying.
(Plus, 2 dollars is like a quarter 50 years ago....)
The Japanese still love their cash and coins. And even though they have a variety of NFC payment options and credit cards are not as terrible as they once were, their adoption rate is slow.
Do you know any? If I could vet its security and """reasonably total""" privacy, the idea could be tempting - e.g. to buy a cheap device to only do monetary transactions. I am not sure, first of all, how you would transform cash into credit into a personal device.
* Country-specific: prepaid cards like Suica in Japan, purchasable with cash from ATMs.
* Not that cheap: offshore bank account.
* Not legal: crypto card with "borrowed" KYC.
So basically unless you're lucky to be living in a country with a privacy-respecting culture, you have to act like a criminal to regain the basic right to privacy.
Because I also know of systems which are related to banks, but explicitly come from your account, invisibly to the seller - but the bank knows everything.
I have seen anonymous pre-paid cards which had in the back the space for a signature, and were accompanied by instructions such as "must be signed to be valid".
Yes, this likely means retailers will play games with change, but other times you will come out on top with the rounding. And think about it this way - yes, sometimes retailers played games with the half-penny too. A few decades on, once you've gotten out of the mindset that someone is "cheating you" out of maybe as much as a quarter-penny every transaction, nobody cares, it's not an actual significant amount of money.
there also are significant costs associated with maintaining currency units that small - it costs more than a penny to make a penny, and while sure, that penny gets used through multiple transactions, that also incurs additional costs on everybody who has to handle that penny in every single transaction. The amount of time and energy spent handling that penny probably winds up being dollars over the lifespan of the penny.
this also gives interesting context to the expression "a penny saved is a penny earned" - that expression today would be "a dollar saved is a dollar earned". A penny was actually a decently significant amount of money when that expression was coined, it wasn't literally "every single quarter-penny matters".
Downside is you have to go during banking hours and you have to make an extra trip.
When I've bought 2nd hand kayaks from someone's home, I've been able to transfer the money on my phone through the banking app and they've seen the funds arrive in seconds. Is this not the case in the US?
That said, Faster Payments in the UK are not guaranteed to be instant and can take up to 2 hours. Also, some banks will arbitrarily downgrade them back to slow old BACs if it flags up as risky on their systems or if it's someone you haven't sent money to before.
In general I agree it's not a problem though, you're not going to let the buyer take the keys until the money is in your account.
However, I did need to borrow his card reader/code generator thing - put my card in, enter the PIN and the amount and then type in the code it generated into my phone to authorise the transfer. Presumably because of the large amount going to a new payee.
They have some biometric auth thing in the app now but I've not set it up or even looked at it yet.
As time goes on, those dollar maximums and notice periods are malleable and completely outside my control.
It’s possible that the kind of account you have with that bank plays a role here. There has been a lot of deregulation over the last 10 years or something, but it used to be that your account had a descriptive name - passbook savings, demand deposit, etc. And those names meant something! A demand account meant you could demand your money any time you wanted, but it was against the law to earn interest. A passbook savings account earned interest, but you were limited in how often you could take money out, etc.
Granted, we were a drive up branch that dealt with commercial/retail so a lot of customers would routinely be dealing with 5k worth of cash. Other branches had similar amounts of cash though.
Strange world
Still, it's especially interesting because the numbers even 15 years ago are much higher in real terms than today.
This is another advantage of inflation.
You can set rules like, you have to declare more than $10k worth of assets traveling with you on flights, and every year, the plummeting value of that dollar metric includes more and more people and activities in the surveillance state.
Cash is also a security risk and liability from a ‘getting robbed’ perspective.
So it’s rare to really need more anymore, except for outlier situations like car sales, which they generally don’t handle well.
I shouldn’t have to schedule something ahead of time which is the equivalent of cashing the average American paycheck. Cash might be a bit of a pain, but there are still plenty of common and good reasons why I might want 5k of my money without having to wait a few days for it.
I remember a guy withdrawing $25k in cash one day. That was unusual, which is why I remember it, but it wasn’t a problem either. (We gave it to him in a big sack, and I was disappointed that the sack didn’t have a large $ printed on the side.)
My wife used to work at a regional branch that did cash management for other banks. The place was like a fortress and had a lot of physical security measures to protect the people and dollars. That branch was nuts - they’d handle millions in currency and be able to handle six figure withdrawals. Midtown Manhattan banks can do that too.
Well, either they made it or I went to 2 different branches, but it was a classic "Why even have the rule with an arbitrary number"
In some countries that's the law.
> I wanted to buy a used car ... the easiest method seemed to be cash
In some countries that became illegal over a certain threshold of expense the payment must be traceable).
I was recently told (but did not verify) that car sellers, in some countries, out of some regulation, nowadays will even ask you how you "made" that money. (And I replied that they'd better know better before being impertinent.)
I am trying to flee - if you know a place in which values (such as aptitude and civilization) are still in place, drop a note.
Interestingly for the context, it was a crisis in banking that "made the first alarms ring", in my case, years ago.
For those reasons I keep a week of cash on hand, not because civilisation might collapse, but as a buffer if my access to the banking system is disrupted.
For a while last year, bank branches had pretty limited hours, and I bank with a out of state credit union (because they have decent interest rates, even if that's 0.5% these days), and some co-op network branches weren't doing shared branching either. So, if I want to be able to buy something over my daily ATM limit, I had to hoard cash, since I couldm't be sure I'd have access to it.
Of course, prices haven't been great for buyers on most things (although I did pick up a well priced Street Fighter II Turbo early last summer and a not terribly priced tandem this spring; lots more nice things went at prices I'm not willing to pay)