Dreams of Being a Person Who Is Good With Cash
When I think about what it means to be a financially stable adult, I always come back to cash. In my mind, financially stable adults always have cash. I don’t mean a lot of cash, necessarily — I mean they’re the sort of people who don’t have to leave the bar to find an ATM down the block, who offer paper bills instead of a fistful of nickels when you offer to make a coffee run, people whose twenties seem never to need breaking.
As of this writing, my wallet contains two dollar bills. Yesterday morning it held two fives and five ones, since eroded by one egg bagel with olive cream cheese ($3.99), one caffè Americano ($3), one unnecessary apple turnover ($3.50), and, this morning, at the very café where I’ve sat down to write about becoming my best money self in 2016, something called a “breakfast cookie” ($2.45). That a person could or would spend almost $13 on four food items that even taken together don’t quite constitute a meal may be a cautionary tale about New York City, but I can’t say I’ve surprised myself. I am terrible with cash.
I should clarify that I’m not terrible with money per se, but when it comes to hanging on to it, I feel most comfortable erecting systems to save money without my noticing. Like anyone else, I tend to save a little less and spend a little more than I set out to, but unemployment has made me into a doomsday squirrel with my income, ready to believe every paycheck might be my last. In preparation for the end, I’ve laddered CDs, set up regular auto-deposits from checking to savings, and arranged to contribute 15 percent to my 401(k) — supplemented by my employer, who matches “100 percent of 1 percent” (lol) of employee contributions. Each of these minor financial virtues is a form of self-defense, quietly escorting money out of sight before I can get my grubby, spendy hands on it.
Thirteen ill-splurged dollars may not qualify as a spending spree, exactly, but it is what I’d call “unnecessary money” — not a bill or financial obligation of any sort, not even a “let’s just split it!” birthday brunch. It is debt by a thousand cuts.
A primary advantage to rarely paying in cash is that my spending is trackable, and available in graph form. I use both Mint.com and Personal Capital to track my money, a pairing that began as a dual trial and has since become a set of twin fixations. I’ve used Mint to lay out a budget for each of my major spending categories: groceries, restaurants, utilities, bars, etc. I can see how much money I spent on coffee, on fast food, on booze, and on rent in the last one or three or six months — good to know, but not exactly good news in some cases. With cash, by contrast, all Mint can tell me is when and where and how much I took out, not why, or for what, or how long it lasted. I’m ultimately less interested in what I spend my money on than in learning to spend less of it across the board, and my habits when it comes to cash help little on that front.
Part of my problem is that I’ve come to think of cash and money as discrete resource pools. When I worked in restaurants, I always had a little bit of cash on me. Between my official tips and the few bills I’d collect for coat check, I had a buffer of liquid money that was both immediate and irregular — some nights $40, others more like $10. When I was able to separate physical cashflow (tips) from income (checks) however falsely, cash came to feel like a bonus, like some extra money that didn’t quite count as mine, and therefore spending it didn’t quite count as spending. The cash seemed incidental, or like a separate income stream — a sort of allowance from the city.
Whenever I made more than $20 in tips in a night, I’d lay out my crumpled bounty on my way to the subway and buy the second-cheapest bottle of wine in the store. Although it made no sense, on those nights it felt like the wine had been bought for me, by the dozen or so old men who’d slipped me a two-, three-, or five-dollar pat of cash in return for fetching them a coat that likely cost more than what I made in a month. I could and probably should have slipped those bills into a coffee can and forgotten about them, but at the time, in the frigid December of Park Avenue at midnight, spending my “allowance” on something as mundanely frivolous as wine or a $5 box of cereal was an assertion of the worth of my day-to-day experience, not only the value of squirrelling for the future.
Now that I no longer work in food service, my cash is less incidental. The only time I end up with cash I didn’t mean to have is when I split the bill with a friend, putting it all on my card in exchange for their half in cash. But even this transaction, despite my unambiguous debit card balance, feels not unlike the faux allowance of my restaurant days, my pocket suddenly flush with cash without associated billable hours.
This mental disconnect of cash and money is especially difficult to rectify in the era of money apps, when you can split a bill or call a car or pay for your coffee without so much as reaching for your wallet. Without the physical act of exchanging money — even symbolic money, like a plastic card with your name and a promise attached to it — it’s easy to spend money without ever consciously thinking about spending money.
The beauty of cash is in its tangibility — its loss or exchange is immediately observable, and its total is finite. Cash puts a ceiling on buying power that can feel nonexistent when paying by cell phone, or even by old-fashioned debit card.
A friend of mine leads what she calls a “cash-only life,” as a bulwark against invisible plastic overspending. Except for bills and other large unavoidables, she pays for drinks, coffee, bagels, dinner—everything with cash. I admire her discipline and envy her de facto personal debt ceiling. I’m sure if I adopted the same cash-only life practice, with a single weekly visit to the ATM, I would spend every dollar I allowed myself every week. But then maybe that’s OK. If the point is that I can spend that much and not more, what’s the harm in spending it?
In 2016, I want to be Good With Cash. I want to be the cash-flush superhero of my cash-only dreams. I want to believe that, if I took a long look at my income and expenses, tallied my needs vs. my wants, and calculated what I need to save every week to meet my year-end savings goal, I could come up with a dollar amount that would cover my needs exactly without dipping deeper into the “real” money that lives in my electronic accounts. An added bonus of this tactic would be a realignment of cash and money in a way that might stick. With finite and tangible resources in my pocket, I imagine I would learn to be more discerning about where and how I spend what’s on me.
This article is part of The Billfold’s 2015 end-of-year series, “Our Best Selves in the Coming Year.”
John Sherman is a writer living in Brooklyn.
