4 ms·

I'll say this, spending cash is harder in the moment. There's a real visceral feeling of loss when handing over actual cash vs card. However, when it comes to

I'll say this, spending cash is harder in the moment. There's a real visceral feeling of loss when handing over actual cash vs card. However, when it comes to tracking long term? Cash always seemed to just ...evaporate, out of my wallet where as I can look back and see my credit card purchases and go 'why did I spend that much on that?!' In my experience, there are two types of people when it comes to money. There are spenders, who could usually stand to cut back, and savers, who could stand to loosen up. I'm definitely in the 'could stand to loosen up' camp. I even went so far a set aside a 'fun money' budget but it mostly goes unspent because my frugality has no chill...

bombcar 3y ago
This is it exactly - if I spend $2k on an item, I'm going to remember that if it was cash or card, but only card tells me "you spend $2k last month at Walmart".
- em-bee 3y ago
  so the benefit is that paying by card makes tracking your expenses easier. but the downside is that it also makes makes profiling easier for anyone who can get access to your bank statements which not only includes the bank but more critically also walmart or any other place where you shop regularly. i rather track my spending manually. there are tools that can help with that too, like receipt scanners. granted, it's more work, so one needs to weigh the options. for me though, supermarkets are the last place that i want to be able to track my shopping because most of it happens there.
  - lazide 3y ago
    The challenge of course, is it's easy to lose or misplace receipts, etc. Some of us have issues with (essentially) self sabotage that way. Some of us have also had issues with people in our lives not so accidentally sabotaging (or stealing) things that way. Come to think of it, I don't know any long term married couples that didn't have one of the two do SOMETHING like that at some point. The nice thing (or terrible, if you're worried about privacy) about credit cards is you can go back as long as you need and figure out what money went where, from whom. When cash is gone, it's gone. If someone has to provide receipts/prove expenses to get more, that can be managed. If someone can just pull it out, less so. Pros and cons either way, of course.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      well, it depends on how you look at it, no matter how much you deceive yourself (or your partner), in the end it only matters if you spend above or below your means. if you spent to much it doesn't really matter where the money went in the past, you need to fix the spending in the future. finding who or what to blame is only half the problem. either you both agree to manage finances or you don't. if you can, put some money aside in a locked savings account that noone can touch. (i had a special savings account that would only generate interest as long as i didn't touch it, but kept paying into it regularly). that's a good way to prevent money from disappearing.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Ah, sweet summer child. The problem cases almost always agree to manage finances together and be reasonable! The money still disappears. No records just makes it easier to be gaslit, or blamed by the actual perpetrator in a court of law. At least when it’s recorded by a third party it’s harder to bullshit about. Two separate friends of mine had their spouses (when under stress) nearly bankrupt both of them using credit cards they signed up for without their knowledge. They found them on their credit reports due to something unrelated, and at least was able to track down what had happened. Both wives had been shredding the statements. One had racked up $80k, another $70k. Personally, I had a large and very vague amount of cash disappear (approx $10k) through likely fake expenses just before getting hit with a bunch of false accusations - when I tried to get away from an abusive ex. Considering I’d been trying to get her to sit down with me and discuss household finances for awhile and how much gaslighting and confusion she was making on the topic (and I really wish I was projecting on this), it was probably a whole lot more. But very difficult to discern. The legal chaos she created shortly afterwards meant I never could get an answer what happened. And frankly was a drop in the bucket compared to the other damage she did. Could have been worse - I have an acquaintance who’s husband got a HELOC on their house and then bailed with all the money before she found out. 5+ years of drama.
        em-bee 3y ago
        sure, but those are cases of outright deception, where, with a bit more energy by the deceiver, tracking expenses through the bank may not have helped. and i am sorry for what you had to go through. your experience makes me think of a discussion just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767454 i don't know how one can protect against that. the only thing i can think of is to prevent anyone in the family from having a high credit limit. or avoid credit cards altogether. but that's much easier here where credit cards are less common.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    We can't be that far from the facial recognition in stores/at registers building that same profile for cash customers :(
    - em-bee 3y ago
      true, but laws making that illegal are also being considered at least in some places, which means awareness of the dangers does exist
    - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
      It’s still socially acceptable to wear a face mask in public
      - em-bee 3y ago
        not everywhere. at least some european countries and aparently some places in the US too ban the wearing of facemasks, some only on large public assemblies and some ban it in general. covid of course made mockery of those laws.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
I definitely feel the "frugality has no chill" attitude. I describe it, charitably, as being an extremely content person. The downside is that there are plenty of things that I could point at that would make my life somewhat better ( replacing my 30 year old Honda with a Tesla or something would definitely save me time on maintenance, for example). The upside is that when something does pass my high bar of "willing to spend money on it", I rarely have to worry about being able to afford it.
gochi 3y ago
Conscious spending could help out both camps. Spenders tend to spend too much on things that don't matter to them, and savers spend too little on things that matter to them. The problem is conscious spending requires more initial setup that a lot of people don't want to do. They don't want to look at their bills and tally up the monthly total, automating that to be paid first, and then looking at their savings/investing/donation goals and taxes/limitations and dedicating certain amounts next per month. That's all too much initial work for them, but once you're on the other side it's glorious. I see how much is in my spending account, and spend it freely if whatever it is matters to me more than just the thrill of spending. So many are just not honest with themselves and what actually matters to them. They have a huge house not because it makes them happy but because it's what they feel pressured to have. But this is a trick, remaining in this state winds up burning you out so much faster because you are not nourishing what your soul wants. What they actually would rather be doing is travelling the world, and yet they only put aside 1% monthly to a travel fund, and 70% goes to a home they don't care about. They wind up never travelling because they distract themselves with irrelevant things, get burned out at their job, feel like moving cities, etc. It happens all the time! To make this clear, this isn't about downsizing. If a big home does matter to you, that should obviously take a much larger portion of your monthly bills. But you can't make these decisions without going through that above work honestly.
fakedang 3y ago
This is literally me. I am a spendthrift with cash, even though most of my purchases would be cheap consumables and perishables - but still I hyper-analyze deciding whether to buy or not. On the other hand, when I pay by card, I don't analyze the buying decision much, even though it's likely a big purchase. Lose-lose either way. I had to put a personal limit on the amount of cash and accessible money on cards I hold on my person because of this.

bombcar 3y ago

This is it exactly - if I spend $2k on an item, I'm going to remember that if it was cash or card, but only card tells me "you spend $2k last month at Walmart".

em-bee 3y ago
so the benefit is that paying by card makes tracking your expenses easier. but the downside is that it also makes makes profiling easier for anyone who can get access to your bank statements which not only includes the bank but more critically also walmart or any other place where you shop regularly. i rather track my spending manually. there are tools that can help with that too, like receipt scanners. granted, it's more work, so one needs to weigh the options. for me though, supermarkets are the last place that i want to be able to track my shopping because most of it happens there.
- lazide 3y ago
  The challenge of course, is it's easy to lose or misplace receipts, etc. Some of us have issues with (essentially) self sabotage that way. Some of us have also had issues with people in our lives not so accidentally sabotaging (or stealing) things that way. Come to think of it, I don't know any long term married couples that didn't have one of the two do SOMETHING like that at some point. The nice thing (or terrible, if you're worried about privacy) about credit cards is you can go back as long as you need and figure out what money went where, from whom. When cash is gone, it's gone. If someone has to provide receipts/prove expenses to get more, that can be managed. If someone can just pull it out, less so. Pros and cons either way, of course.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    well, it depends on how you look at it, no matter how much you deceive yourself (or your partner), in the end it only matters if you spend above or below your means. if you spent to much it doesn't really matter where the money went in the past, you need to fix the spending in the future. finding who or what to blame is only half the problem. either you both agree to manage finances or you don't. if you can, put some money aside in a locked savings account that noone can touch. (i had a special savings account that would only generate interest as long as i didn't touch it, but kept paying into it regularly). that's a good way to prevent money from disappearing.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Ah, sweet summer child. The problem cases almost always agree to manage finances together and be reasonable! The money still disappears. No records just makes it easier to be gaslit, or blamed by the actual perpetrator in a court of law. At least when it’s recorded by a third party it’s harder to bullshit about. Two separate friends of mine had their spouses (when under stress) nearly bankrupt both of them using credit cards they signed up for without their knowledge. They found them on their credit reports due to something unrelated, and at least was able to track down what had happened. Both wives had been shredding the statements. One had racked up $80k, another $70k. Personally, I had a large and very vague amount of cash disappear (approx $10k) through likely fake expenses just before getting hit with a bunch of false accusations - when I tried to get away from an abusive ex. Considering I’d been trying to get her to sit down with me and discuss household finances for awhile and how much gaslighting and confusion she was making on the topic (and I really wish I was projecting on this), it was probably a whole lot more. But very difficult to discern. The legal chaos she created shortly afterwards meant I never could get an answer what happened. And frankly was a drop in the bucket compared to the other damage she did. Could have been worse - I have an acquaintance who’s husband got a HELOC on their house and then bailed with all the money before she found out. 5+ years of drama.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        sure, but those are cases of outright deception, where, with a bit more energy by the deceiver, tracking expenses through the bank may not have helped. and i am sorry for what you had to go through. your experience makes me think of a discussion just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767454 i don't know how one can protect against that. the only thing i can think of is to prevent anyone in the family from having a high credit limit. or avoid credit cards altogether. but that's much easier here where credit cards are less common.
- majormajor 3y ago
  We can't be that far from the facial recognition in stores/at registers building that same profile for cash customers :(
  - em-bee 3y ago
    true, but laws making that illegal are also being considered at least in some places, which means awareness of the dangers does exist
  - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
    It’s still socially acceptable to wear a face mask in public
    - em-bee 3y ago
      not everywhere. at least some european countries and aparently some places in the US too ban the wearing of facemasks, some only on large public assemblies and some ban it in general. covid of course made mockery of those laws.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

I definitely feel the "frugality has no chill" attitude. I describe it, charitably, as being an extremely content person. The downside is that there are plenty of things that I could point at that would make my life somewhat better ( replacing my 30 year old Honda with a Tesla or something would definitely save me time on maintenance, for example). The upside is that when something does pass my high bar of "willing to spend money on it", I rarely have to worry about being able to afford it.

gochi 3y ago

Conscious spending could help out both camps. Spenders tend to spend too much on things that don't matter to them, and savers spend too little on things that matter to them. The problem is conscious spending requires more initial setup that a lot of people don't want to do. They don't want to look at their bills and tally up the monthly total, automating that to be paid first, and then looking at their savings/investing/donation goals and taxes/limitations and dedicating certain amounts next per month. That's all too much initial work for them, but once you're on the other side it's glorious. I see how much is in my spending account, and spend it freely if whatever it is matters to me more than just the thrill of spending. So many are just not honest with themselves and what actually matters to them. They have a huge house not because it makes them happy but because it's what they feel pressured to have. But this is a trick, remaining in this state winds up burning you out so much faster because you are not nourishing what your soul wants. What they actually would rather be doing is travelling the world, and yet they only put aside 1% monthly to a travel fund, and 70% goes to a home they don't care about. They wind up never travelling because they distract themselves with irrelevant things, get burned out at their job, feel like moving cities, etc. It happens all the time! To make this clear, this isn't about downsizing. If a big home does matter to you, that should obviously take a much larger portion of your monthly bills. But you can't make these decisions without going through that above work honestly.

fakedang 3y ago

This is literally me. I am a spendthrift with cash, even though most of my purchases would be cheap consumables and perishables - but still I hyper-analyze deciding whether to buy or not. On the other hand, when I pay by card, I don't analyze the buying decision much, even though it's likely a big purchase. Lose-lose either way. I had to put a personal limit on the amount of cash and accessible money on cards I hold on my person because of this.