I got paid today (yay!) and I’ve got a work meal coming up so I got some money out ahead of time and so I could get some lunch. I didn’t realise just how long it’s been since I’ve had cash in my hands until I saw two crisp £20 notes come out of the till and they had changed completely from the old notes I was used to.
It was weird just how fake they seemed, like monopoly money and how easily I succumbed to thoughts of, ‘is this legal tender?’, ‘have I been ripped off?’ and ‘agh I have no receipt!’ I wasn’t intending to break into them today but I used one to buy my lunch as I had to know there and then if they were real notes and not some con of an ATM.
When the guy on the till took the £20 note and I applogied for ‘not having anything smaller’ as is the custom, I was relieved to see there was no hesitation. I had imagined him looking at me, as they often do with Scottish notes, and going ’sorry we don’t take these’. Thankfully I still have something of ‘value’ in my wallet and not some pretty bits of paper.
This whole event really pointed out to me how long it’s been since I had money in my hands and how different it feels than a credit or bank card. I, like many people, have become almost robotic in handing over that bit of plastic at tills, so much so that I had forgotten was real tender looked like!
I’ve recently fallen victim the the credit card. I had always promised myself in the past, being very debt conscious (though my students loans set me up on the slippery slope of debt I’m now on), that I would resolve never to have a credit card. I heard nothing but bad stories about them and didn’t want to cross that line.
However in 2007 I had a cash flow crisis and the only help I could get, not being on a student account any more, was to apply for a credit card. I diligently only used it for real emergencies at first and NEVER spent anything I couldn’t afford to pay off in my next wage packet.
This process went on for about a year and at odd times I had the thing paid off and kept a zero balance on it, but then I hit a few financial wobbles and I got back into the habbit again. Eventually I found that even though I was able to pay the balance off by the end of the next month, just before I got paid I would run low on funds and have to buy the odd thing on the card. This started my dependance on them.
I was still able to pay them off in full up until about last Christmas (not because I went overboard, I’m not one for doing that any more, it was just a tight month anyway) since then I started paying the balance in a couple of instalments. Once I crossed this line there was no turning back. (Be warned, if you’re thinking of doing the same don’t if you can possibly avoid it and certainly don’t for something tacky that you’ll shove in a draw and forget about!)
Since then the balances started building up and up and now I struggle to pay double the minimum balance. This hasn’t been helped by huge rises in in my budget for all my utilities and food this year, taking a stake out of my credit card repayment fund.
The banks play the long game, it took them 18 months to get their claws into me but they did it. I always wondered why people get into this postion but now I know the hard way. This whole trend has meant that instead of having cash in my hand to buy the bits and pieces of food or whatever to get by I’ve put it on the card, hence why I’ve been so out of touch with money.
Of course money itself is just as big an illusion, it’s a promise to pay the barer in gold, but of course we don’t go around using precious metals any more to trade with. However there is something very real about having a few notes in your wallet, that I had almost forgotten about until I got some money out of the wall today. Having been trained to accept paper for gold, we have now been trained to accept plastic for the paper…what’s next? Who knows!
