Hello, Money Door Blog community!

I am back from a wonderful vacation in Spain with my family, and am excited ot be with you again. Being in Europe and watching the way Spain values time so differently than we do in the US (dinner at 10pm, afternoon siesta before going back to work in the evening) got me to thinking about how other countries value money.

I found a fascinating article on England's changing relationship to cash from BBC news from earlier this year and realized its points were mirrored in my own relationship to money. 

According to the article, it is more and more likely that if we are using cash, we are getting it from an ATM rather than any other source. I stopped and thought as I read this that ATMs are the only way I have gotten cash in recent memory. My own personal bank, USAA, does not even have a physical branch so ATMs are my only option.

Even more interestingly, the article states that:

"Despite the changing ways in which we get our hands on it, the popularity of cash for actual transactions among consumers is shrinking. The number of transactions made by cash is forecast to be outstripped by non-cash payments by 2015."

This also feels true for me in the US as well. I prefer to use a debit card in order to make my bookkeeping easier to track and reconcile through Quicken. Which led me to ask the question:

"What is cash's role in a financially conscious society?"

When in the CB level one course, we talked about ways to track cash: having a separate cash account in Quicken or QB in order to look at where cash went. Some people liked the fact that cash is harder to track and only recorded the fact that they had taken it out and then spent it at will, without records.

We tend to think of cash as "real money" but as we move away from using it as primary currency, it brings me back to the discussion about complementary currency. 

If our relationship to money becomes simply a balance we check at ATMs or online or at the bank and is rarely paper that we hold in our hand as bills and coins, is there really any difference between standard currency and credit achieved by trade?

Money is then simply credit for time that you contribute to your work that you can then trade for other goods or services.

Hmm. Sounds quite similar to the system in Japan (discussed by Bari in her post about Bernard Lietaer) where people worked in order to gain credit for their parent's health care that we discussed before. 

I'd love to hear thoughts in the comments about what you feel still distinguishes government currency from local currencies and trade once we see cash as having a much lesser role. 

Let's discuss!