Money--How Much?

[Verdant]

"If you have to walk through a questionable neighborhood, it's best to walk like you're on your way to rip someone's face off."
-- Harry Dresden (The Dresden Files)

A fellow reader!! Stopped reading Dresden at 13 or 14 books in. Interests took me elsewhere and I may return.

 

[RonB]

I’m old fashioned I guess and like to carry some cash even though I use my credit cards for most purchases. I do get a fair amount of cash to pay my small contractor and handyman for work on my house which they prefer for obvious reasons.

 

[Jaylotw]

The only cash I carry is weekend gig money, so anywhere from $25-200, depending. I tend to recklessly spend cash when it's there.

My farmstand at markets accepts cc. Just by accepting cards, sales have gone up 10-15%. Most people pay cash still, but I can often winkle out another ten bucks out of a sale just by mentioning I can take cards. That's big when your primary income is from vegetables.

The only time I routinely extract cash from the bank is when I'm going to one of the local Amish stores. These aren't the touristy ones, but the hardware and farm stores run by and for the Amish. They of course welcome the English, but cards are not accepted in any of them. Funny, though, is that Amish people all have bank cards and use them.

 

[karam]

I rarely carry any cash with me.

 

[mso489]

I use mostly cash for day-to-day expenses. I often start out with about sixty bucks but the amount dwindles, so it is often less in walking-around money. I'm parsimonious with plastic, since those expenses can incur interest and fees, and I try to pay them off completely every month. In a larger city, I'd have to carry half again as much, and maybe half as much in a rural area. Plastic is easy, but if anything goes wrong with bill-paying, the big corporation has their hand in your pocket big time. When I pull out plastic, a red light goes off. My habits are so 1950's, I seldom use an ATM. It used to be required to get travel money at work, but I haven't used them regularly since. My brother-in-law calls them "money from the wall."

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Banks hate cash so much that they even promoted laws to make it illegal to carry too much. It’s like if you have more than $10,000 cash, you can have your money taken from you and get jailed for “structuring.” That’s why I never carry more than $9,999.

 

[mso489]

Bit coin and other digital "money" is a total turkey shoot. The people who program the systems presumably have a faint notion of what it is and how it works, but everyone else is living on dreams and enthusiasm. They are to money what derivatives are to investments, black boxes where the last thing you can learn is what is going on. Meanwhile there are vast banks of servers in cold places soaking up vast amounts of electric power to maintain what is supposed to be digital currency, or ... choose your own conceptual language here.

 

[username]

I very rarely carry cash.

 

[didimauw]

I rarely ever carry cash. And when I have it, the wife needs it. Every time.

Money is expensive.

 

[lochinvar]

I've been involved in banking since about 2001 and hospitality all my life. Even taking out natural disasters and power outages, the networks go out far too frequently for me to depend only on plastic.
It also pays to have cash ready to seal a deal. If you have to go find an ATM or cash a check, seller's remorse can kill your great deal...or just some jerk relative talking in their ear. Strike while the iron is hot, or something to that effect.

 

[trouttimes]

I always carry cash. I don’t worry about mugging. Uncle Sam spent a great deal of time and money on me to make sure things like that don’t happen to me. I use cash as much as I can. I don’t like too much tracking of what I buy. My business and no one else. Of course there are things I have to use plastic for. I just hold it to as little as possible.

 

[mortonbriar]

I cant even remember what all the bills look like, I get a couple of hundred dollars worth of coins for the kids weekly pocket money for the year, but other than that cash is very rarely in my life.

 

[Jwebb90]

My family recently moved from the US to Bulgaria. They are still largely a cash based society, so carrying cash is a necessity. Interestingly not only are paper bills still important but coins are as well. I’m enjoying this change (pun intended).

 

[trouttimes]

Data is money/power, just ask Facebook or Google. A cashless society is very convenient but it opens people up to complete data mining. Buying habit is valuable information. A cash based society is much harder to control and much harder for surveil.