Since I ended up with some cash after the holidays again, I am revisiting the topic of cash being used less and less in the current economic climate.

This is not what you may think from the title, just some musings from a recent challenge I had. In problems that are not  really problems, I had a 100 dollar bill come into my possession.  I still use cash in some situations, giving my kids their allowance, making small donations and small purchases every now and then. So, I was on the lookout to break it.

Now, large bills are not as easy as they used to be to spend and this 100 dollars needed to be dealt with.  My normal plan of action is to spend it the next time I am at the grocery store and get back smaller bills. Well, this time, I walked into to my usual store and they had changed over to all self-checkout over the last few months. What I didn't notice until now is that they no longer accept cash after this changeover.  I don't know, I am sure I could have gone to the customer service desk and paid somehow, but, it was not worth it at this time.

Over the years, I have used cash as a budgeting tool. When I was younger, I did the "Twenty Dollar Bill Plan" when I wanted to buy a CD changer for my truck. If you are not familiar, this was an idea where you could only spend 20 dollar bills. If you wanted to buy a snack that was two dollars, you would in theory pay 20 dollars for it, all your change would go into a jar to be saved. If you ran out of 20 dollar bills, you were done until the next payday.  It was a great plan, because not only did you save a lot of money, but you stopped buying small insignificant items. (It also worked a lot better 30 years ago when stuff was cheeper.)

When I was first married, we did a cash budget, setting aside cash at the beginning of each month to spend for each budget item. Once it was gone, we were through spending.

Whether accurate or not, studies have shown we spend anywhere from 3 to 10 percent more when we uses cash instead of credit cards.  All this is to say, maybe our move away from cash is having a real world impact on overall debt and spending.  I would think crypto will exacerbate this issue, as it is digital and the amounts are varied from what we are used to when making transactions.