Terry Prone: Digital payments are fine but, like most of us, I still prefer to carry cash

Flexible as my phone payment system is, it won’t talk to supermarket trolleys

Having a €1 or €2 coin to hand to release your supermarket trolley is but one of the many reasons to make sure you have cash to hand. Picture: iStock 

I haven't told Bank of Ireland yet. I’m keeping them in the dark for the moment.

At some point, I will fess up that my debit card has gone walkabout, but not yet.

It disappeared about a fortnight ago, and in the old days I’d have cancelled it that very minute.

After doing a bit of a search, of course.

But now, I am sophisticated. I have an app and can go on it to find out where my debit card has been and what it’s been doing with itself, which, up not this point, is not much.

It has been dormant. Comatose, even. No bad guys have been using it to get cash out of ATMs or buy booze in off-licenses. I can effectively watch it snoring.

That’s the great thing about the app, which I visit at least once a day, even though it won’t give me a landscape view. Meaning it won’t go sideways. It insists on standing straight up, which I don’t like at all. However, it tells me, every day, how solvent I am or how much I am nudging into being broke.

I pay people on it, which reminds me that at some time in the future, I may get to tell younger folk that once there was a time when, if you owed money, you would be advised by clever financial people not to pay the bill for 30, 60, or 90 days, which would give you the use of your money during the time that elapsed.

That postponement stuff always bothered me. If I owe you money, I want to pay you off right now, never mind postponing the evil hour.

The app reduces my anxiety. If no miscreant is out there using my debit card, it stands to reason that it’s in some pocket of mine, somewhere, and will eventually surrender to repeated searches.

In the meantime, it isn’t a bother because I can pay for everything using my phone.

Half the time, these days, I don’t bring a wallet with me, knowing that everything from a total in the supermarket to a taxi journey will respond to my mobile phone, which, immediately thereafter, will send me a helpful note to make sure that I was willing to pay the taxi driver. Which I usually am.

The query “card or cash?” now causes me to offer my phone and be much happier when the transaction causes that little ping than I used to be when I’d hand over the missing card.

Even though I have nothing even approaching a criminal past, nor the financial competence to arrange a good fraud, I always worried, when I used to hand over the card, that it would be declined with that look of contempt that says: “We know what you’re trying on, here, but it hasn’t worked.”

My phone doesn’t provoke that same fear. It also removes the need to carry my wallet, except when I’m likely to be asked for identification or insurance. The original purpose of the wallet — to carry cash — is slightly historic.

Which is why I was surprised to learn, from the insurer and pensions provider Royal London, that cash is still king.

Royal London Ireland did some research and found that what it defines as “the vast majority” of us believe it is still important to carry cash.

No particular age limits on this belief: Youngsters and old folk all wanted to have a stash of folding money.

The reason being, according to the researchers, that now and again electronic payment systems go down, as happened not so long ago in Spain and Portugal.

If you’re starving for a meal and can’t pay for the ingredients in your local supermarket, then a few €20 notes might come in very handy, all right.

The only cash I feel insecure if I don’t have is a €2 coin and a €1 coin. This is because, flexible as my phone payment system is, it refuses to talk to supermarket trolleys, and being without a coin in such a situation is the ultimate time-waster.

Either you have to use one of those plastic pull-along trolleys, which don’t ever accommodate a serious set of groceries, or you have to go to the courtesy kiosk and negotiate.

An ever-expanding set of hacks on social media maintain that you don’t actually need a coin at all. The roundy bit of a key will do the job. Oh yeah?

That presupposes you keep all your keys untethered, whereas if, like me, you have them all hanging from a key ring like any good jailer, this hack doesn’t work.

Any more than using your wedding ring doesn’t reliably work, and negotiating with the courtesy desk is considerably cheaper than replacing a damaged ring. Easier to keep those two coins in the car.

Around this time of the year, I’m awash in fivers, too. Old fivers. Fivers that have seen better days. This is because, during the summer months, the Martello tower wherein I live is open to the public at weekends for tours.

You’re not obliged to pay for a tour, but the notice on the gate indicates we’re not going to fight you if you wish to contribute to keeping the tower from falling apart. One Swedish couple, this year, saw the notice only as they exited, and stuffed a few quid into the letterbox with a lovely note.

The fivers, though, illustrate a demographic pattern. Every one of them came from someone north of 65. Why older people should be so flush with fivers is a mystery, but bless them for it.

Some cash-hoarders have good reasons for the habit. If you want to give someone a quick gift, a few hundred quid stuffed into an envelope is the simplest way to do it.

Yes, you can go into the post office and buy one of those gift card things, but that takes time, since every post office has a resident queue.

Not to mention that infuriating thing that happens when the recipient, a few months down the line, re-discovers the card in an anorak pocket and faces the choice of trying it in a shop and being humiliated when it is revealed that there’s damn all left in it, or going through an online process to find out the same thing. 

Dirty old fivers, it has to be admitted, never put you to that trouble. Or any trouble.

Just be careful if you’re over 65 and planning to give a cash gift to a grandchild or to the kid who mows your lawn.

Double it. No, seriously, double the amount of money you first thought of. And you know why. You know why, because when YOU were a 10-year-old, aunts and grannies used to slip money into your hand.

But, then and now, an amount that feels big to an elderly giver doesn’t feel so big in Smyths
Toys Superstore.