Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
I know very few people who will have more than $50 on them during a typical day, because every single transaction uses a card. I've seen people ask their friends for cash money, because they needed to pay some weird person trying to sell art or provide service without paying taxes, but none of my friends or gaming group ever have more than a couple of bills worth no more than $50, usually more like $10 to $20.
Abroad, I may carry more cash, but I noticed that my friends who live in Denmark and the Netherlands almost never have any cash, so it's not purely an Icelandic thing. More and more, you just don't use cash in modern European countries.
The only time I see anyone with $100 or more in cash is when someone is paying for goods and services under the table, because they are avoiding taxation or the goods are stolen, or when someone is buying drugs. So, it's more of a thing I see professionally than a part of daily life for people without skills like Streetwise.
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I hadn't realized things had gone so far. Of course, I reached adulthood around 1970, when customs were presumably different even in Europe; my experience might not be typical even in the United States.
As much as anything else, this is an expenditure control strategy. If I take cash out of my wallet, I feel the outlay emotionally. Putting something on my debit card feels less real; there's not the psychic barrier of, "No, I don't have enough money for that." Takiing out a certain amount each week is a way of defining a "petty cash" amount that I'm prepared to spend without advance planning and without first checking my bank balance.
In any case, you're quite right that my habitual cash balance wouldn't last me long if I needed to pay for a place to stay with it. I might not even be able to get one; I first got a credit card after dealing with hotels that expected every guest to have one.