Paying with cash costs Americans $200 billion a year

Electronic payments – by phone, card and computer – continue to gain market share. And yet, millions of Americans choose to use cash.

Market share? we're talking about people spending money in one form or another.

But there is a cost to using cash – in both time and money – that’s not always taken into account. Those costs include fees to use a check-cashing service, withdraw from a non-network ATM fee or access wages loaded onto a payroll card.

Let's look at what it costs to use a card. People don't realize that there is a little hidden fee that merchants pay on top of their fees to use the visa/discover/mastercard/American Express. These fees are always passed onto the end user(also known as the purchaser/cardholder). So instead of hitting the cardholder with a 1% fee for every transaction the card company hits the business up for it then the business passes it along. I can see how they've done their homework at the card companies. Hit the cardholders account for 1% and they'd stop using the card outright. Hit the business and then everyone pays regardless of what payment they use cash or card. Cash purchases end up benefitting the business in the end.

I think $200 billion is a drop in the bucket to the 1% fee we already pay.
Soaring Credit Card Transaction Fees Squeeze Independent Businesses This article only mentions the credit cards costing $47 billion a year. This does not include the Debit transactions which garner a larger portion of sales through card use.

Debit Card Transaction Fees: Signature Vs PIN


Quite honestly both businesses and individuals are politely getting screwed by card companies. All need to do is spend our own money and they get some of our cash for doing nothing more than putting that card in our hands.

The point of all this? Using these cards are costing us much more than just using cash

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

For the average American family, the cost of cash is about $1,739 a year.

That isn't chump change. Can't believe people are so dumb as to pay non-network ATM fees, check cashing service fees and the like to such an amount. If this is a real number we have just located the biggest failure of the public school system! No financial education.

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For the average American family, the cost of cash is about $1,739 a year.

That isn't chump change. Can't believe people are so dumb as to pay non-network ATM fees, check cashing service fees and the like to such an amount. If this is a real number we have just located the biggest failure of the public school system! No financial education.

Hate to say it, but in the 80s in NYS, if you were smart enough to be in Algebra I, you were also supposedly smart enough to not need the Financial Math.

I think the hidden fees are whats remarkable. We don't even get a choice in paying the fees. they add them in and we gleefully pay without even knowing how much we've been taken for.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

For the average American family, the cost of cash is about $1,739 a year.

That isn't chump change. Can't believe people are so dumb as to pay non-network ATM fees, check cashing service fees and the like to such an amount. If this is a real number we have just located the biggest failure of the public school system! No financial education.

Hate to say it, but in the 80s in NYS, if you were smart enough to be in Algebra I, you were also supposedly smart enough to not need the Financial Math.

It isn't just the math. It is the sense to realize what the math means to your life. Sigh, then again with social welfare to take care of you for life, I wonder if I have it all wrong and I don't need to work my ass off.

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For the average American family, the cost of cash is about $1,739 a year.

That isn't chump change. Can't believe people are so dumb as to pay non-network ATM fees, check cashing service fees and the like to such an amount. If this is a real number we have just located the biggest failure of the public school system! No financial education.

Hate to say it, but in the 80s in NYS, if you were smart enough to be in Algebra I, you were also supposedly smart enough to not need the Financial Math.

It isn't just the math. It is the sense to realize what the math means to your life. Sigh, then again with social welfare to take care of you for life, I wonder if I have it all wrong and I don't need to work my ass off.

Indeed, it's not just the math.
But somehow, the two got ... conflated, I think, would be a good word?
I think if my father had known that (he also went through the NYS Regents system, but high school was in the 50s for him), he'd have had my brother and I in the financial courses as well.