by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: January 05, 2010

Many of the advantages of paying with cash have suddenly become considerably more apparent to tens of millions of people in the horrific aftermath of credit crunch and the associated economic chaos. For a great many years, plastic was the payment method of greatest preference but as reality has hit home with a vengeance and people are left with credit card bills which they very often can not pay, the cash option has suddenly become considerably more attractive.

The principal advantage of paying with cash in this respect is that of course one must have the funds available before one can spend them. Dealing only with cash means that one spends only what one earns and credit card or overdraft debt is not accumulated, very often indiscriminately. This gives one far greater control over one’s personal finances and facilitates a very simple budgeting system which is much easier to stick to than allocating funds to be paid to different credit cards as and when the bills fall due.

The advantages of paying with cash must also be made to include the fact that it is the safest way of guarding oneself against credit or debit card fraud. Although cash can of course be lost with no form of recourse that would be likely to exist should a debit or credit card be lost, if cash is lost in this fashion, it is only the value of the cash which will require to be written off. If a credit or debit card is lost and perhaps goes unreported for any one of a number of reasons, a great deal more damage in a financial sense can be done in the interim.

Credit and debit card fraud does not simply occur when a card is lost or stolen. There is the greatly increasing risk of what is known as card cloning, where unscrupulous individuals obtain details of one’s card and manufacture a reproduction which they then use to run up very often a sizeable bill. Although investigation can often lead to reimbursement in these situations, the inconvenience and worry which is caused at such times is something which can be wholly avoided by always paying with cash.

The advantages of paying with cash are of course unlikely to produce any significant decline in the use of plastic over a longer period of time. Technology has simply progressed too far for such a regression to be practical in the longer term. Until the present economic climate is seen to change for the better in a most significant sense, however, the advantages of paying with cash are likely to appeal to a great many and help them to sleep easier in their beds at night.

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