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.

I'm still working through the envelopes I inherited from my uncle in 2002 😁

@Justanotherlurker Thanks for your take on this. It's all so worrying.

Big tech, especially, worries me and, yes, to all the shenanigans at Twitter and, very likely similar stuff happening at all the other tech companies, that we don't know about yet (may never know). Don't even get me started on the internet safety bill. It's a disaster in the making.

Big tech has too much power. They deal in our information after all. And also if people think Western governments aren't going to abuse the system (hello Canada) then people are naïve indeed.

On a tangent but I was thinking that another consequence of a cashless society would be a rise of the black market - similar to what happens in over-regulated countries.

I absolutely agree. My adult son is learning disabled and autistic. We manage his finances at the moment but he will never be able to have a bank account in his own name. He has already been excluded from and refused entry to a number of venues. I am absolutely furious that our Government are allowing this to happen.

Modern bank accounts like Monzo do all that for you, i.e. categorise your spending, save money in virtual "pots", etc.

Or you can take a download csv of your bank activity from your online banking and import it to a spreadsheet or money management app that does the analysing and adding for you.

You certainly don't have to do it manually and it doesn't need to take much time at all.

No, 99% of post is junk mail. The only "proper" letters are from antiquated organisations like the council tax bill from the council or hospital appointment letters from the NHS. All bank statements, utility bills, etc are electronic via email or on their apps/website.

As for "hours to set up", no, I opened a Monzo bank account in 30 minutes fully online, the analysing/categorising is automatic, and setting up "pots" takes a few seconds. For my other accounts, extracting a csv file of transactions takes maybe 5 minutes the first time, much quicker thereafter when you know what you're doing. Importing it into an app or spreadsheet, another few minutes.

No idea why you'd take hours to do it! Perhaps you should give it a try, you may be pleasantly surprised how easy it can be.

Why can't you set him up with some kind of "top up" card where you put a small amount of money on it for him to spend. If he loses it or spends on the wrong things, you've not lost much as there was little on it to start with. No different than giving him a few notes and him losing it or spending it on the wrong things.

It's what we do with my 80+ year old mother with dementia. She lost huge amounts of cash when she was "in control" of it, but since we've taken cash away from her and given her a top up card, she's not "lost" anything at all and we can monitor her spending on the app.

Once she "disappeared", for a few hours. She won't use a mobile phone, so we were actually driving around her area and usual haunts to try to find her. We kept checking the app to see if she spent any money to give us a clue where she was. Suddenly it pinged at a small Asda shop a couple of miles from her home, so we headed there in the car and found her, completely lost, wondering around an unfamiliar area. She doesn't even know her own address, let alone our phone number, so it would have ended up a police matter for them to identify her and take her home somehow if we'd not used her card app to locate her!

Sounds like you’re more than tech savvy, in case you’ve not thought of it. If you’ve got an Apple phone consider hiding an air tag in her bag or coat, it makes scary situations like this a lot easier.

Thanks for suggesting that, it's a brilliant suggestion that we need to look into.

i use a coin for shopping trolleys if i haven't got a token. apart from that i can't think of the last time i use cash. i'm starting to feel stuck in the dark ages tapping my card. i really need to set up my phone to make payments.

fwiw i don't think cash should be scrapped yet... there are older people who don't use the internet... but maybe in 10-20 years.

You don't need to use the internet to operate a debit card though.

no, but you do if you want to keep track of your spending?
i can't imagine it's many people though. the only people i know who don't use online banking are in their 90s. they insist on using cash, but they don't handle it themselves: their family do. so online banking would be the same.