[mikekchar]

There are a couple of times in my life when I was quite poor (for someone living in a G8 country...) The biggest thing I learned was to use cash. Cash is awesome because you can see how much you have and you can't spend more than you have. Even now that I am relatively well off, I have my habitual routine of getting cash at the beginning of the week and spending only that for the week. In fact, I make sure that there is always a bit left over at the end of the week (because there are always surprises).

The thing that is frustrating for me in western countries is that using cash is becoming more and more difficult. The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

In the UK, I used to use my Oyster card (a pre-paid travel card for public transit in London). I could basically use it like cash. You put in whatever money you want at the beginning of the week and then you can use it without worrying about over spending. If you ever travel in London, be aware that the payment system is buggy as hell and they will over charge you badly. With the Oyster card it's great because I can notice that my balance is lower than it should be, go online and get a refund (seriously ... it happened at least 3 times a week for me!!!) But now they are pushing using your bank card as a payment mechanism. They have access to all of your money and you have many less ways of detecting when they have overdrawn (or penalized you for the failure of their equipment to register your badging in).

Again... these companies know exactly what they are doing.

As an aside... I often wonder what happened to the laws about accepting legal tender. There are a number of times that I've been refused service because I wanted to pay cash (hotels and car rentals being the biggest culprits). Is this actually legal?

[silveira]

Civil forfeiture laws in the US. I don't feel safe carrying a reasonable amount of cash. Here the police can just rob me, and now I'm guilty until proven innocent.

In DC it costs up to $2500 for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, it's complex, expensive and it can take years.

[rhino369]

You are way more likely to get stuck up by a mugger (aka the real cash risk). But 2500 is insane. Is it really that much? Or does that include attorneys fees.

[akshatpradhan]

>You are way more likely to get stuck up by a mugger (aka the real cash risk).

Can you provide citations? Thanks!

[jonas21]

There were an estimated 345,031 robberies in the US in 2013, of which 42.5%, or about 146,000, were street/highway robberies (muggings) [1].

For the 13 years between Sept. 2001 and Sept. 2014, the Washington Post analyzed records from the DOJ and found 61,998 civil forfeiture cases "that were not made at businesses and that occurred without warrants or indictments". This is around 4,770 per year. [2]

Neither of these are broken down by location, race, etc. so your particular circumstances may vary, but at the aggregate level, you're about 30 times more likely to be mugged than to have assets seized at a traffic stop.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/08/th...

[JoeAltmaier]

Wow, but I don't expect my public servants to stick me up. Something terribly twisted about that.

[jonas21]

Yeah, and I don't mean to defend civil forfeiture at all. It's a very troubling practice. But it is interesting to see how far off we can be at evaluating the risk of various things happening.

[khuey]

Realistically, if your choices are the police who might rob you, and bankers that will rob you ...

[sremani]

Technically, the cash is guilty not you.

[a3n]

I guess if cash is speech then cash can be a person too.

Can I send my cash to jury duty? :)

[venomsnake]

I think that we can skip the middle layer wetware and just elect cash president. With the (multi) billion campaign season that comes - who is in charge will be just a formality.

Side note - how amazingly high ROI you got with donations to politicians - for a couple of hundred of million - you get people that oversee and direct the 3-4 trillion dollar federal budget (scale to state level too).

[ams6110]

It rarely happens. Like cops shooting unarmed people in the back, it isn't something that you really need to worry about.

[TDL]

Even if it's (asset forfeiture) a statistically rare event, we have to worry about it because it is a deeply corruptive practice. Asset forfeiture goes against much of the philosophical underpinnings of this nation.

[eevilspock]

sadly, ams6110, HN is allergic to sarcasm.

[gizmo686]

Being legal tender means that something must be accepted as payment for a debt; it does not mean that it must be accepted as payment when no debt exists. For example, if you go to a restaurant that serves you before giving you your check then they are required to accept cash. However, they are allowed (possibly depending on jurisdiction) to insist on being payed by card prior to serving you.

[dkuntz2]

There's very little incentive to accept card only. Cash, unlike credit or debit cards, doesn't carry an interchange fee, which means the full amount is going to the business, instead of losing some money to interchange.

[DanBC]

UK Banks charge fees for handling cash.

[pyre]

> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

This has more to do with the hotel's liability. If you steal from the hotel or damage the room, they will apply those extra charges to your credit card. Even if your credit can't cover the costs, your verified credit card information tells them that you didn't provide a false name, and they have someone to chase after to recoup the charges.

[mikekchar]

I live in Japan now. In Japan they take a photocopy of some ID containing your address for that purpose.

My understanding is that the reason hotels want a credit card is that they pre-charge it with a deposit and then refund it when they check the room. You never see the pre-charge transactions so you don't know about it.

I have successfully negotiated with some hotels to take cash by offering them a cash deposit. Some hotels refuse to do it, though. I don't even have a credit card any more (mostly out of choice, but also because Japanese banks tend not to give credit cards to non-permanent residents), so the next time I travel in the west (soon) is going to be an adventure...

[pyre]

> so the next time I travel in the west (soon) is going to be an adventure...

Well, there are pre-paid credit cards. You could always try those, but IIRC some hotels refuse to take them.

It's also easier for the hotel to just charge extra to the credit card than to track down the person and possibly send the debt to collections. I've personally witnessed (while working for a hotel/casino) people get charged for things that they took from the room (robes, towels, etc) on the day that they checked out. At that point, the hotel already has the money, and dealing with the charges is the customer's problem. If they just took down information, then they have to spend time chasing down the customer to get them to pay the extra bill. From what I know of Japanese culture, delinquent customers are probably not as much of a problem as they are in (e.g.) the US.

While I can understand how much harder it is for hotel patrons without credit cards, hopefully you can also see it from the hotel's perspective when dealing with "bad faith" customers.

[nandemo]

Banks certainly issue credit cards to non-PR foreigners. I got one as a student. My initial limit was very low, though (100,000yen~=1000usd then).

I know people who got refused cards by multiple banks before succeeding. But it's not nearly as hard as getting a home loan, which usually does require PR.

[polm23]

If you change your mind about having a card, ANA cards are relatively easy to get for foreigners.

[mrb]

I wonder if there would be an interest in a virtual credit card (NFC smartphone) showing you how much money you can spend for, say, the rest of the week. You would be able to configure your desired spending limit. The virtual credit card app would automatically be able to update the amount of money spent whenever recurrent charges are processed automatically. The idea is that whenever you pull your smartphone to pay, you always see exactly how much you have spent so far. As opposed to the situation today where nobody logs in multiple times daily on their bank/credit card website to check how much they have spent.

[tomtang0514]

Here in HK and Shenzhen we have similar thing called Octopus card where you can use it on almost anything other than buying house or cars or "high-class" shopping. An even better part is that almost all octopus card scanner has a display for the amount just charged so you can dispute right away. To encourage people to use them, there're even discount stands on the street. A "discount stand" is basically a machine that you can scan your card and get $2 off your next purchase. Yes, that's its only functionality and you don't have to input email or any BS, just scan it. That's my favorite part of HK.

[mr_green_tea]

> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

> In the UK, I used to use my Oyster card (a pre-paid travel card for public transit in London). I could basically use it like cash.

You might want to consider a pre-paid credit card :)

[fmueller]

> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

In Switzerland one must - by law - accept cash as payment. Is this different in Canada?