To be sick of cashless society

[Ihatepcos]

I prefer to use cash, I always have.

I find budgeting and spending so much easier. If I am tapping away on my card I think nothing of constant £3 £6 etc being spent on things I probably wouldn't buy if I was spending cash.

More and more places simply don't take cash and it's driving me mad.

Why do you think cards don't work internationally?

I have 3 different cards, they all work almost anywhere. I've used my phone to pay in...I don't know, 15 countries at least?

I'm trying to get my tweenage kids to learn about money and budgeting etc. It's really difficult because they don't handle the physical cash like we used to - now it's just tap their card or order stuff online. I can't give them regular pocket money in cash because I rarely have any on me to give them. So it tends to be bank transfers instead.

If adults struggle to cope with cashless money management then kids have no chance. And they'll grow up struggling even more.

My dd lost 3k of savings by transferring it piecemeal to my rotten, bankrupt ex and step mother - £50 at a time (sometimes several times a day). Spent it on drugs and takeaways probably. Of course they never paid it back, but despite the amounts involved dd still hasn't grasped the severity of it.

I hardly ever use cash when I go abroad. Most people don't

Life savings are not in cash - they are in the bank - and once you have to start giving your bank account details for every petty little purchase, you are opening up that channel into the place you keep all you money.

Unless you have separate accounts which many people do for those things and aren’t using the same account for day to day purchases. Not every account gets a card and some have rules about access.

Most here are not saying to get rid of cash completely, more that they either don’t use it or it is easier for them to use another form of payment.

Cash is not going to be phased out anytime soon. They said the same thing about books being eventually phased out due to Kindles and such and obviously that didn’t happen.

Nobody mentioned local bank transfers, I have no idea why you would, costs of moving money internationally are insane, I have no idea if any bank would only charge 2%.

I was talking about a simple card transaction, put card in the machine, a small charge is made each time by the bank. These small charges add up and the original value of the £20 'disappears'.

People said that a few years ago re undeclared property lettings where there were huge numbers of people with a second (or multiple) properties they were renting out without declaring the income. HMRC had a long term "task force" looking at property transactions via Stamp Duty returns and Land Registry records, then started to cross reference house sales against the tax returns of those listed as the seller, both to check capital gains tax had been paid and also that property rental profits had been declared. People who thought they'd "got away with it" or who simply didn't think they had to declare anything suddenly found themselves the subject of formal tax enquiry and had to pay back the tax they'd not declared!

Same happened with IR35. Things happening in the background, research and data being analysed from multiple sources, then "wham bam" lots of contractors working in a particular firm received enquiry notices. Easy picking for HMRC - they did a "trial" case against one particular contractor working in a particular firm, deemed caught by IR35, so they hit all the other contractors working there under the same contract!

There's lots going on behind the scenes to "maximise" the results/outcomes of their resources rather than the old fashioned inefficient scattergun approach. You really don't know (no one knows) what data they've got and what "cases" they're putting together. Their new intelligence computer database system (linked to other governmental agencies such as DVLA, land registry, etc) is pretty new.

As for inheritance tax returns, I do know that at least some are checked against land registry records, as usually when a property is involved, the executors/beneficiaries will sell it to raise funds within a couple of years or so, so whilst HMRC may not immediately check the IHT return, they are almost certainly checking subsequent property sale records (via land registry) at a later date. It's why addresses of property have to be put on IHT and CGT returns, so they can cross check later.

I feel sorry for the elderly or vunerable people living alone with no one to help them.
It's wrong to presume everyone understands and has access to the internet. Simple things like going to the cash point, paying bills over the phone by debit card, paying by card in the supermarket, direct debits etc etc.. all of these totally baffle my elderly parents even though I help.

You're completely missing the point. Every time you hand over your bank details, you are creating a route into your money, you are handing over data - and we all know how easily data can be breached, how there are lists of card numbers for sale on the dark web.

No, it can't be avoided altogether. But there's a difference between paying by card in, say, Sainsburys; where you would hope there'd be good controls in place, and paying by card at some tiny outlet - a random food van, say, where you have no idea whether it's legitimate or not.

As for my phone tracking me - we are not all slaves to our phones. Mine spends most of its time sitting at home, with the blue tooth and mobile data switched off. I don't need to be online all day, thanks. If I had to pay for things with my phone I might no longer have that choice.

Did you go to a private school?
My school had no computers in early 1980s. About 1884/5 they got one computer. There was a big push to get one computer in every school in the country. I never got to use it.
At university in the mid to late eighties all essays were handwritten. There was a computer suite that was only for students doing computer studies. 1989 my first job and offices all still had secretaries and word processors. It was not until 1995 I got a computer at work. I moved to a new job a couple of years later and found myself in an office with a shared secretary and no computer. Had to wait until 1998 for my next computer.
There are always go ahead firms that introduce technology early. But computers have really only been commonplace in offices for about 25 years and are far more recent in the home. For a long time only gamers and those interested in computing had home computers. They were expensive.

Plenty of elderly people can do the very basics such as send an email or use facebook but can't manage anything more complex.

One of my clients is a convenience store, who very roughly are 50:50 between cash and card sales. Their monthly bank charges are more than their credit card charges, and it costs them a lot in bank charges to bank the cash they take. It's over the relatively small amounts covered under normal bank charges, so they're on a pretty high "handling" fee by their bank. The owner is looking forward to more sales by card as it will reduce his bank charges (and save him a shed load of time in cashing up, travel to the bank, risk of forged notes, etc).

However hard I try supermarket trolleys don't release themselves from the one in front with the tap of a card.

No, you need a trolley token for that.

Even the Big Issue sellers in our area has card readers!!!

I prefer cards/phone use. I actually think it makes budgetting easier as I check my account online daily and can see exactly where my money is going. ''Bloody hell! I spent £30 down the pub last night! I need to rein my spending in sharpish!''

If you want to budget then get a card like Revolut and just transfer over your spending money each week/month. You can track your spending on an app and see how much money you have left to spend. It is easy to top up. I use one for my daughter.

A lot of small businesses round here prefer cash due to the charges they have to pay when cards are used. Some are actively begging for cash to be used to save them money. However, cash can also cause a problem if they have an excess of it, as some banks charge a huge commission fee to bank cash now. So the small shops can't win.

I'm an accountant and I see bank statements where people are paying for every single drink in a pub, £3.80 several times in a night, whereas years ago they would have paid for one drink and then had cashback to pay for the rest. These transactions can often cost 20p per transaction plus a % depending on the card merchant that they use.

On the other hand, some pubs prefer cards because staff don't have to hand over change so there is less room for theft and errors.

Covid made a lot of people switch to cards when they had used cash for years and they just haven't gone back.

Ultimately a cashless society will prevent a lot of fraud and tax evasion as people won't be able to work for cash in hand. Every single payment will be tracked one way or another.

I agree that bartering will make more of a comeback as people will swap services to avoid recording the sale.

No, you're missing the point. It's so easy to manouvere, you don't need to give your details at all!
I ahve a revolut account, it has a physical card and a virtual card on my phone. On the latter, every time I pay with it using my phone, it generates a new, one time use, card number. Nobody gets my bank account details, or my card details. Nobody can clone it or use it.

By not learning how to use these things properly and safely, you are shooting yourself in the foot. It's so easy to protect yourself from all those things your so worried about but don't actually bother to deal with.

And don't kid yourself that The Man can't find you a track you a thousand times over anyway!

OK I understands you now. That's just the handling fee though! The value of the £20 doesn't "disappear".
So you think banks just look after your business cash for free?
You will always pay a handling fee, it's one of those things that has to be accounted for when opening a business.
I'm sorry but that argument doesn't hold enough weight.

The lovely cashier at my local pharmacy did this for me, I was using Apple Pay but the pharmacy has a policy of needing a PIN for transactions over £30

Your an accountant and don't know that there are endless options for cards that don't charge transactions fees on everyday purchases? Who on earth is paying 20p plus a percentage fee on every pint in the pub?

It’s really deliberate and sinister that suddenly in every supermarket there are only two self service tills out of ten that let you pay by cash, and so you have to spend 3x the amount of time queuing. If it was one store that did this then you could blame them but all of them doing this at the exact same time? It’s coordinated and deliberate.

you're

Wow. The paranoia! It is deliberate, but it's not sinister, it's simply that they know that a far larger percentage of people WANT to pay with card rather than cash.

I think that works for people budgeting with a decent budget.
When money is really tight cash works best. You take £10 out and when it has gone it has gone. I have seen friends do this on a night out. They know if they are drinking especially it is easy to lose track. But with cash, once it is spent it is spent.

I hate cash, always have done. I hate taking £10 out of a cash point for something £5, that extra £5 I'll just waste on stuff I don't need or wouldn't have bought.

Plenty of elderly people can do the very basics such as send an email or use facebook but can't manage anything more complex

Plenty of people a lot younger can't either, due to laziness more than anything, my 82 year old mum is better than loads of people much younger with her phone as she is interested and chooses to learn how to do it. It's important to move with the times and try to understand new tech as it comes in.

I’d like a choice.

We were at a football match last season, all food and drink sales are strictly card only and the system failed. They couldn’t, in a stadium of 74000 people, sell any food or drink because there was no way of taking cash.

At a match last week I helped a man out who was standing near the kiosk while I was in the queue, he wanted a drink but only had cash. He gave me his £3 and I bought his drink on my card along with my other purchases.

On the other hand, our two local fish and chip shops will only take cash.