Cash is a Stranger to Me

I was recently in the city to have lunch with some friends, and I think it may have been the first time I ever went to a credit-card-only restaurant. There was some confusion as we tried to figure out how to split the bill with one person wanting to chip in cash and two people being willing to use cards, but then not having enough small change to appropriately share the cash. I suppose we could have asked the server to just put different amounts on each card but that seemed even more complicated!
Later that afternoon, I stopped in a cafe to grab an iced coffee. (It was one of those weird hot days and I was getting rather parched walking back to the train station.) Again, no cash was accepted. (I was also a bit shocked that a small iced coffee cost $4.75. I think I am already becoming unaccustomed to the ways of NYC. But it was very good coffee.)

Whether or not I'm going to places that don't accept cash, I find that I almost never spend it anymore. Every couple of months, I get my hair cut, and pay for that in cash. Once in a while, Sweetie and I will go to the local pizza place for lunch and we'll pay cash for a couple of slices. And occasionally there will be some other little thing. It used to be that I might buy a copy of a newspaper. But I get home delivery of the New York Times 4 days a week, and now I read the Wall Street Journal at the library. Even parking meters always seem to take credit cards now.

The Times just published an article about the backlash against this phenomenon: This Legislation Could Force Stores to Take Your Cash. I can see both sides of the issue. People argue that going cashless shuts out poorer people, who are unlikely to have access to credit and bank accounts. But businesses like the safety and administrative ease, and governments like having a data trail to prevent tax evasion and corruption.

I hope paper money doesn't disappear completely-- like postage stamps, paper bills are almost works of art, and I've always like collecting unusual ones from my travels. But I can't say I'll be using it very actively myself.

Wallet Woes

Given the title of this blog, you’d think I’d write more often about my actual wallet. I’ve been using the same one for most if not all of the time I’ve been writing this blog. In this post from almost 10 years ago, I talked about my wallet and what was in it. The contents today would be almost identical, except for the Blockbuster video card!

For those who don’t click through the link, my daily carry wallet is a small nylon zippered card size pouch that I bought at Muji many years ago. It has a flap pocket on the outside secured with a Velcro tab— I keep my Metrocard in there as it’s easy to slide it out when I ride the subway. The zippered part has a little mesh divider to keep my coins separate from my cards and cash. I always have 2-3 credit cards, drivers license, gym card and a few other cards in there, as well as cash. The cash has to be folded in half, which isn’t ideal but I usually don't mind. I also stuff receipts in there, so the wallet can get a bit crowded sometimes and I regularly clean it out and reorganize it.

This wallet system has really worked for me— it’s lightweight, very pocketable, and unobtrusive. I’ve gotten so used to it, I rarely have trouble digging around to find anything even though it is small and a bit cramped. And the wallet has been surprisingly durable given that I am using it so much.
But nothing lasts forever— the velcro tab on the outside hasn’t really worked for a while, but now, more importantly, the zipper is tearing. In anticipation of this day, I”ve been checking Muji on a regular basis to see if they sell anything like this anymore but they don’t. And now that I’ve been more desperately looking for a replacement, I’m discovering that one one else really has anything like it either! Everything I've seen is too big, too small, lacks pockets, has too many pockets, etc. So I’ve been trying to open up my mind to the idea of using a different kind of wallet.

I’m trying to remember the other wallets I used earlier in my life. The earliest one I remember is one of those Velcro-closure wallets with contrasting trim, made out of the same sort of woven synthetic fabric as many backpacks. That would have been what I used in junior high, and maybe into high school. Sometime in high school I was given a full size women’s wallet, in a faux leather grey and black pattern, made by Liz Claiborne. I think I used that into my college years.
After college, I had a period where I used a pocket size Filofax to carry my cards and bills, and just put coins in my pocket, which was one of the reasons I always hated shopping for clothes, as many women’s pants don’t have pockets!
At some point, I started preferring a small pouch style wallet, starting with a little card size one made of some kind of Guatemalan or Mexican textile, which I probably received as a gift. It was cute and colorful, and I still have it somewhere. Because that wallet was so small, I supplemented it with a leather card holder from Coach to store things like insurance cards, business cards, and backup credit cards that I don’t use as often. The Mexican textile pouch was replaced with the Muji pouch.

I’ve experimented a little with other wallets. When one of my grandfathers died, I was given a wallet he’d owned— a pretty typical fold-over men’s wallet. I tried using that briefly but never really liked it that much. I also tried to used a different style of Filofax that had a full zipper around it and more pockets, as the idea of combining a notebook and wallet into one always seemed appealing, but in practice I found it too bulky.
The other wallet I currently own and use on occasion is a Bellroy passport wallet. Bellroy advertises a lot online, and I was sucked in enough by it to purchase their Travel Wallet. It’s actually a brilliant wallet— I love how it can hold boarding passes, all sorts of currencies, a passport, an extra SIM card (even though I haven’t had a use for that in years), and even comes with a mini pen. But I only use this wallet for international travel— if I'm not bringing my passport with me, the wallet just seems too big to carry all the time. Despite the size, I did try to carry it as an everyday wallet for a few days, mainly because I just loved it so much I wanted to touch it more often! The leather is really nice, and I wanted to break it in more. But the problem was that it had no space for coins. Most of my pants do have pockets at the moment, but I really don’t want to walk around with change jingling in them. And I don’t want to have to use a separate change purse. I use my coins as much as possible each day and don’t accumulate them but I still need someplace to put them.

In searching around online for a new wallet, of course those Bellroy ads starting popping up again so I took a peek at their website… and lo and behold they have a new wallet that is designed to hold coins: the appropriately named Coin Fold. After much deliberation, I ended up ordering one. It holds flat bills, cards, a SIM card should I ever have a spare again, and there’s a clever little coin pocket. I’ve been mentally enacting how I would use this wallet in my day to day habits. I think it will hold what I need it to hold, but will it be awkward to use? Will there be enough space for the coins? Will I be able to pluck them out efficiently when I’m trying to pay with exact change and there are 10 grumpy people in line behind me at the deli where I get lunch? As of this writing, that remains to be seen…  and I know I’ll have to adjust to one feature this wallet is missing, which is that there is no separate external pocket where I can stash my Metrocard. Will I be able to whip out my Metrocard fast enough without fumbling in front of the turnstile?

It’s funny how nothing is ever perfect in life. If you say you want A, B, C, and D, you’ll only find things that have A, B, and C, or A, B, and D, or B, C, and D… plus E, which you never cared about before, but now you are swimming in doubt because maybe E is better than A anyway, or is it??? I have probably looked at a hundred wallets, and all I really want is the one I have, even though I’m lusting over this new thing because it’s made of pretty leather.

Don't think it hasn’t occurred to me that I could repair the zipper on the Muji wallet… but it pains me to think how much a tailor would probably charge me to replace that 3 inch zipper— less than a new wallet for $100, probably, but I’m sure the price vs. value would still annoy me, and I’d be hearing my mother’s voice in my ear, saying “see, I told you you should have learned more about sewing!” Though if I presented her with my Muji wallet and a 3-inch replacement zipper and asked her to fix it, she’d probably be totally annoyed, as she often was when I was a kid and would ask her to sew together fantasy wallets and notebook covers of my own design. Some things just aren’t fun to sew, even if you love sewing.

So we’ll see if this creature of habit can form a new habit with a new wallet… which will still be an open wallet, of course!

How to Invest My Cash

For the last few months, I have had a very pleasant problem: approximately $150,000 in cash sitting in my savings account. Most of this is from the proceeds of selling my condo, plus a little growth from savings and interest. I have been holding off on any big investment decisions for a while, partly out of pure laziness and partly because there are some possibilities floating around for how to use the money. 

One thing I might do is buy all or part of some real estate Sweetie owns, as since Sweetie isn't working and I am, there could be some tax benefit to me being the one with the mortgage. 

Another possibility is going into business with some friends who want to invest in rental real estate upstate. There are some college towns where the investment return on properties is quite attractive. Though I didn't want to be an active, hands-on landlord, I don't mind doing some occasional work and otherwise being a passive investor, and trust the friends involved, one of whom has hands-on experience as a real estate agent and property manager.

And then there's just the stock market. I just bought $20,000 more in mutual funds to add to my E*Trade portfolio. I am tempted to put even more in, figuring I could sell some of my earlier investments if I need to free up cash later. 

There's no easy answers, but again, this is a good problem that I am glad to have!

Mint Adds Manual Transactions

Mint.com has added a feature many people wanted: the ability to enter cash transactions and manually enter future transactions in other accounts. But the way it works is a little weird.

Let's look first at adding manual transactions, for instance to a checking account. This makes a lot of sense, as you really need to know what pending transactions could affect your account balance. You can enter a future check with a check number and later, when that check has actually cleared against your bank account, it will be automatically reconciled so you don't have a duplicate entry. I'm not sure how this would work with a savings account where there's no check number to help with matching the transactions.

As for cash transactions, I don't like the way they've implemented this. You can add a random transaction that isn't counted against any account if you just want to track cash expenses against a budget, but there's no way to maintain a cash account and enter expenses against it. Instead, they want you to assign your cash transactions to your recent ATM transactions, which some people were using as a workaround already. I guess they've made it a little easier to do that, but they've missed half the point of bothering to track cash in the first place. Cash is cash, and what matters is the total you have and the total you spend-- why would you need to assign it to a particular ATM transaction? And what if you receive payment in cash and then spend that money?

Another thing worth noting is that you can't yet enter new transactions from the iPhone app, which is really a necessity. Mint says they're working on adding that soon, though.

You can read more about this all works at the Mint Blog. Some of the comments bring up these exact issues so perhaps they'll listen to their users and make some changes.

But on the positive side, after using Mint for a couple of months now, I have to say that there is a lot to like about it. It's very easy to set up and I love being able to check my balances and see transactions on my iPhone. That makes it all the more frustrating that they have left a lot of good features out-- I wish I could see how the individual stocks and mutual funds in my portfolios were doing on my iPhone (showing how much they were up or down, not just the current price), rather than just a total balance. I wish the budgeting categories were a little more flexible. And the cash transaction thing is just bizarre. Let's hope they keep refining this without heading off in the wrong direction...

Whaaa?? The Gift that Does NOT Keep on Giving

Hey, I've got a deal for you! You will lend me $50. In order to do this, you will have to pay me a service charge of $3-7. If I keep the money for longer than a year, I'll owe you $2 less every month. If I don't pay you back in 3 years, I'll owe you nothing at all! Great deal, huh?

You'd think no one would be crazy enough to lend that money, but it's actually incredibly popular to do exactly that: millions of American Express gift cards are sold every year. You give American Express money up front that they don't have to repay to a merchant until later-- essentially you are giving them a loan, but they will charge you for the privilege.

I noticed this story in today's business section-- fortunately, American Express is eliminating the most obnoxious of those fees, the monthly charge for not using your card for over a year. But they still charge a purchase fee of $2.95-6.95. (More info on gift card fees.)

I think I've only been given an American Express gift card once, but I thought $50 was $50-- I had no idea how much of that could be eaten up in fees. If you want to give someone a gift, just buy them an actual present, or give cash.

My Life in Transactions

The other night I had dinner with an old friend I'll call "Ace." We were really close back in college, then grew apart for a few years, but reconnected a few years ago and now have a great long distance friendship. Fortunately she comes to New York on business sometimes, and we always have a great time whenever we hang out.

This time, we had dinner at a restaurant in Chelsea. As a side note, it's just amazing how many businesses are turning over in this economy. The first restaurant I wanted to go to had closed. The second restaurant I wanted to go to had closed. But fortunately, its space had been taken over by the third restaurant I wanted to go to, which had moved and expanded.

After finishing dinner, we lingered for a while as Ace sipped a $16 glass of single-malt scotch. I'm usually glad that I do not enjoy such things given the expense, but this time I took a sip and kind of liked it-- uh oh! Anyway, the check came and we all started trying to figure out the bill. Sweetie, who was with us, wanted to use a credit card, as did I. Ace wanted to pay cash, so this led to a bit of befuddled calculating as we tried to figure out how to split the bill on the two credit cards and split Ace's cash, which involved making change, etc. Afterwards, I of course whipped out my Treo and entered the cash received into Quicken. Sweetie made some sort of "oh, there she goes" remark and Ace laughed and asked what I was doing. As I explained my extreme cash tracking habits, she grabbed my Treo and started looking at it.

First Ace was just amused at her own inability to figure out my Treo-- she kept swiping her finger across the screen as if it were an iPhone. But once I showed her how to scroll down, she started making fun of all my cash transactions! Here's some of her remarks:

Whoa, you need to spend less on food! Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast, lunch, lunch, lunch. And were you drunk when you entered some of these?? "HOok?!?!" What's up with that? You have a breakfast problem and a capitalization problem! Wait, you really were drunk, look at this one! "BEer!!" And "HOse thing??" I don't even want to know! Haircut $100, wow, I can't believe you spend that much, but they used to be a band... "Amanda-- French," hmm, who's Amanda French and what are you paying her for? Sweetie, did you know about this? And let's see, Girl Scout Cookies $4... oh, and here's another one where you were drunk, "DUpe keys," ooh, was that so Amanda French can get in? And earrings $4.31? What the hell kind of cheap shit earrings did you buy for $4.31? And windshield fluid, what? You don't even have a car, you must have been drinking it when you made all those typos...

It seemed to go on like that forever. It was just hilarious hearing her spin all these crazy tales about my life out of my misinterpreted cash spending! I'm just glad she didn't figure out how to switch to viewing my credit card transactions!
Have you ever showed your spending records to anyone? Did you ever think about how your life would look to someone who saw them?

Searching for Higher Interest Rates?

Check out this link from My Money Blog. Jonathan gives some great ideas on where to park your cash in order to earn somewhat less than abysmal interest rates!

I've been meaning to do some investigations on this front myself. I've built up a fair amount of cash again and so far, I've just been moving it into my FNBO Direct account, which is earning 1.5%. But I still have smaller amounts that are earning .02%-.06%, which is just appalling. It's less appalling than having lost 20% in the stock market, though!

Feeling Flush

I'm not sure why, but I've built up quite a cushion in my Chase savings account-- just over $12,000 as I'm writing this. This is despite having made an extra mortgage payment of $2,000 just recently, and some transfers to other accounts. I use this Chase account to receive my direct deposit pay, and transfer money into my checking account to pay bills. I wondered if I'd made a mistake and forgotten to pay a bill, but apparently I'm all caught up!
The problem is that this cash is barely earning any interest. I think it's time to start shopping for some mutual funds again, and also transfer some money to my other savings account at FNBO, which earns more interest. I suppose I could also make another additional principal payment on my mortgage. In any case, not being able to decide what to do with over $10,000 is a nice problem to have!

Wallet Hacks

If you've got any cash left in this lousy economy, here are some good ways to carry it around!

16 Wonderful Wallet Hacks at Cool Materials

My favorite is the wallet made out of money:

Going Without A Slip: New ATMs

I love the new Chase ATMs where you don't need to use an envelope or a deposit slip-- they make depositing checks, and even cash so easy and fast!

The first time I used one, I was a bit confused. I'd spent several minutes hunting around the bank lobby for envelopes and was really annoyed that they seemed to have run out. Finally someone from the bank told me the machines had been switched over and that I didn't need one!

All you need to do to make a deposit is endorse the back of your check and feed it into a slot when instructed. Sometimes the ATM uses OCR to recognize the amount of the check and says "The amount you have deposited is $40. Is this correct?" If not, it asks you to enter the deposit amount. You have the option to have your ATM receipt include a miniature scanned image of the deposited check, which I thought was really cool!

Last week, I took these ATMs one step further-- remember how I was talking about having all that money in my wallet? The wad of cash included a $100 bill and a $50 bill. I spend cash very rarely, and only on tiny purchases like buying coffee or lunch. I was inwardly groaning in anticipation of being given a hard time by a cashier when trying to break such a large bill.

(As an aside, why is that? It still seems like no one wants to change anything larger than a $20, but you'd think we'd had enough inflation over the years for $50s and $100s to be more commonly in use. And you'd think they'd get rid of pennies, and perhaps even nickels too, but we Americans seem to just love our small denominations.)

Anyway, while depositing another check at the ATM I decided it might be a good idea to just dump my $100 and $50 bills, since I didn't really need to be carrying so much cash. I stuck the $100 in the slot, and bingo, the machine recognized it as $100. But then I tried to stick the $50 in, and after several attempts, it was not being accepted. It was one of the old $50 bills, and I guess the machines are programmed to accept only the new design. At least I hope that is the case-- I'll be really pissed if I ended up with a counterfeit $50 after putting the dinner bill on my credit card!

And that would be the subject for a whole other post: what do you do if your friend unknowingly pays you with counterfeit money!