Go to your parents. I'm assuming most readers here are around my age, born 1982 +/-.
So your parents should be somewhere around 60 to 80.
So go to your parents and give them a $100 note and ask them to break it. As in change to smaller denominations.
There's a high percentage chance that they will be able to do it with the money in their wallets. Doesn't matter whether you asked mum or dad.
There's an even higher percentage chance that they will be able to do it with the money within the house.
Somehow, the older generation still keeps this cash is best idea. Which is fine. They hold anything between $500 to $10,000 on their bodies or in the house. This, I find totally amazing.
Usually, I don't keep more than $100 in my wallet. I mean, why would I need to? Everything is on my credit card cos you get good rebates. Cash is typically for food courts/hawker centers, taxi, some provision shops which are cheaper cos they parallel import their stuff from other countries. Usually, not much cash is needed. And even if I don't have enough cash, there's always NETS. More often than not, if the shop doesn't accept cash, they likely would accept NETS. Sure some places don't. That's why I carry around $100. But there's no real need to carry any more than that right?
Then there's the money in the house. Previously, I never had any cash in the house. Whatever is in the wallet, that's it. Same as for my wife. Currently, we keep a little bit of extra cash. Maybe another $200 or so. This amount is used to top up our wallets when we run low on cash to carry out. Cos we don't have an ATM close by. Well... actually it's quite close by, 5 minutes walk, but we're lazy, so we keep a bit of extra cash at home to top up our wallets and if the house cash runs out we top that up when we need to.
So really, this puzzles me. Why does the older generation carry more cash?
I've asked around my friends they usually have the same experience as well.
I find no good reason. There's always other options and ATMs are readily available at MRTs and credit cards can be used almost everywhere.
I'm not even going to talk about i-banking. It took me some time to convince my parents to accept their monthly contribution via i-banking. Somehow they just liked handling the cash when I passed it to them. Luckily, now, I just set the monthly payments on i-banking and I don't need to bother about them anymore.
Ok I know some older businessmen under declare their tax, so they don't like putting money through the financial system, but that's only a handful.
So yea, why????
Pls if anyone has the same experience or knows the answer, pls enlighten me below.
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