They could be given a pre-paid debit card for the day instead.
Is that practical? How would it work? Would this mean having a supply of disposable cards and using a fresh one each day, or a system where a card, or the account linked to it, was remotely reloaded overnight each day?
Such a system would have to be highly reliable, and would require the user to be able to remember, or keep notes on, how much they had spent and therefore how much they had left on the card. An advantage of cash is that anyone able to grasp the value of coins and do simple arithmetic can tell what they have left just by looking in their purse, etc. With a card, someone who had forgotten by 16:00 that they bought something at 10:00 might think they had £7 left on the card when actually they only had £2.50 left.
The big problem with the pro-cash movement is it’s riddled with able bodied conspiracists ......
True. However I think in some cases while physically "able-bodied" some people influenced by conspiracist beliefs are made vulnerable to them due to mental health conditions, especially paranoia and anxiety.
I also think anxiety about venturing into the unknown and unfamiliar, and having to rely upon unknown people and machines, is challenging for people with anxiety-related conditions.
The only adult I know who would be directly affected is someone who has no contactless card, etc, and is very unwilling to have one. If told she could not get on a bus without one, she would probably feel compelled to give up using buses, would walk locally and just not go to places further away.
This is not directly linked to belief in conspiracy theories, although I am worried that she is becoming drawn towards those which support and validate her fears about using cards.
Her main problems around using cards are:
- fear of overspending or getting into debt.
- fear of fraud.
- fear of something technical going wrong and her not knowing how to resolve it.
- fear of any of the above resulting in fraught interactions with bank staff, bus drivers, shop staff etc, which she will be unable to manage due to social anxiety.
Her income is paid into a building society account which has no card, etc. Each week she withdraws enough cash for her weekly general spending, making sure she leaves enough in the account to meet utility bills, etc.
This leave her reassured that her bills will be met, and able to keep track of spending by glancing in her purse to check what she has left.
She fears that if she used a card instead then, unless she kept a careful record of each transaction, she might lose track of her spending and accidently spend beyond her limit needed to have enough 'bills money' left.
This is of course in itself a rational fear for anyone on a limited income and without savings.
Her unfamiliarity with all forms of IT, and reading alarming newspaper stories about frauds, do not help. She finds dealing with unhelpful officialdom very difficult and foresees (and gets anxious about) all sorts of things which might possibly go wrong in using a card and could lead into terrifying attempts to negotiate with banks, etc.
My attempts to reassure her by referring to my own experience of successfully using cards, etc, are ineffective because as she realistically points out, my circumstances are quite different. I know much more than she does about both IT and retail banking, as an experienced union rep I am quite comfortable in negotiations with officialdom and with pursuing complaints, and I could afford to exceed my typical weekly spending by far more than she could before it caused me any problems. She points out that problems which would be serious for her would be trivial for me, and realistically she is right.
To what extent we should regard these anxieties as a kind of disability might be open to question.
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