ANZ Bank has announced a significant chunk of its bank branches will no longer hold cash.
While ANZ hasn’t specified how many branches will no longer hold cash, it is a sad – albeit inevitable – turn of events.
Evidently, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) recently reported half of all Australians don’t use cash at all.
The same report concluded, for those Australians who do use cash, the number of withdrawals has fallen from four per month in 2019 to two per month in 2023.
What’s more, the number of ATM’s around Australia has halved in the last five years.
I’m an advocate for cash when it comes to discretionary spending. In fact, I would go as far as saying it is an essential rite of passage for any young Australian learning how to budget.
When I first moved out of home, I was hopeless when it came to budgeting. As money came in, I would spend it.
I was living with my Uncle Jimmy at the time, a master budgeter, who gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received. He suggested I withdraw $200 cash at the start of every weekend and make it last until the same time the following week.
This was 2010 and tap and go, or contactless payment, was around, but not nearly as prevalent as today.
However, it was available at all the bars and restaurants—the places where I could do the most damage if I got carried away, which is what made the use of cash so effective.
Knowing an unbudgeted item must come at the expense of something else is very powerful. The choice becomes simple: if you spend money on A and B there will be no new laptop or holiday at the end of the year. Which one do you want? You can’t have both!
While tap and go is certainly convenient, it’s almost impossible to keep track of what you spend. By using cash, I had to be much more disciplined. When it was gone, it was gone. Simply look at the empty wallet for the evidence!
It’s astonishing that (according to the RBA) tap-and-go card payments now account for 87 per cent of all point-of-sale transactions. Only a decade ago it was roughly 50/50!
I suspect many people, if they were honest, would agree tap-and-go leads to bad spending habits.
To this day, I withdraw my discretionary spending cash each Friday. I’m not sure I wouldn’t fall into old habits if I had to go completely cashless.
Could this be the last decade we use cash in Australia?
I hope not…
