It wasn’t so long ago that cheques ceased to be used as a form of payment in many stores. Now we tend to pay by cash or – more commonly – by card. Many have questioned the idea of living without cash in the past, but how would this affect our daily lives and what would it mean for different currencies around the world?
We’re familiar with the different currencies that are used around the world. If we go on holiday we get the currency for the country we are travelling to. We use cash as well as paying by card for our purchases while we are there.
Now imagine being in a society where cash is no longer used. Banknotes don’t exist anymore and neither do coins. Each currency is used in a virtual sense and is transferred between accounts when people pay for goods and services using credit or debit cards.
This seems to be a strange proposition, since cash is still a part of the society we live in. It would change how we react to having a foreign holiday too. At present you can get currency cards which are loaded with your chosen amount of the currency of the country you are visiting. These would definitely become more popular if cash disappeared altogether, since they are really the closest you can get to cash payments without using a credit or debit card.
In reality we can definitely exist without cash. The question is whether we would want to. Credit cards are a major part of society today, and they have only been around for a few decades when compared to currency in general. They could also be blamed for the advent of lots of people spending more than they can afford. Credit cards per se haven’t caused this, but they have made it easier to live beyond our means. If we got rid of cash altogether, we might value things even less than we do at the moment.
Some say we are heading for a major reset point in the world. Perhaps we’ll end up with the opposite situation – we’ll go back to cash and not use cards at all. Can you imagine what dealing in different currencies would be like then?