Every year when my husband gets a really, really up close look at how much money we actually give the government on an annual basis, he goes on his annual tirade that we spend too much money. Now, when I say we spend too much money, he doesn’t mean on things like kelp-squish skincare products or the expensive peanut butter that doesn’t have salmonella in it. He means on those non-essential items like the pills that keep one of our kids from having seizures. Just kidding.
He did read about this awesome concept where you don’t use any credit or debit cards. The theory is that by actually handing over cash, you can watch it disappear from your wallet. It’s supposed to make you be more careful with your purchases. In theory, anyway. He carefully explained it all to me while my eyes glazed over from the sheer lack of interest in trying this.
Day One: His plan actually cost us $48 right off the bat. I can’t watch the money carefully disappear from my wallet if I don’t own a wallet. Or a purse to put it in. I’m not being all diva here, but I seriously had to buy a purse and a wallet–and I mean at Walmart, not Kate Spade–because he handed me cash for the week and I had nowhere to put it other than stuffing it down my bra.
Day Two: I had to use the credit card at the gas station.
“What happened to the money I gave you yesterday?” he demanded.
“Where was I sitting when you handed it to me?” I asked, my mind becoming a foggy haze.
“In your office,” he said with a growl.
“Then it’s probably on my desk.”
“Why?!”
“Because I couldn’t find the scissors to cut the tags off the new wallet. Oh wait! The scissors should be in the pencil cup. Next to the cash.”
Day Three: I had to write a check out of his account to pay for our child’s baseball uniform.
“What the hell?!” he demanded.
“I had to pay for her uniform, and that was something you budgeted for,” I explained patiently.
“AND I HAD THE CASH TO PAY FOR IT!”
“Then you should have taken off work and showed up for her baseball game. It’s not my fault the soccer moms who run this town decided to schedule baseball games at 11:00 in the morning,” I explained even more patiently.
Day Four: The Great Dry Erase Board Debacle of 2013
My husband actually went and spent money on a dry erase board to hang up in my office so we could keep track of what expenses we had to pay each month. It was a $20 dry erase board, and it only came with double-sided foamy tape that he refused to stick to the wall. It’s now hanging in the garage. You know, where we’re sure to see it every day.
Day Five: I had to use the credit card again.
“Seriously? Now you’re just doing it on purpose to derail the plan,” he argued. “Where did you shop?”
“The liquor store. And my weekly budget doesn’t even cover the amount of alcohol I’m going to need to not care about this dumb plan.”
Sigh. “I hope you bought enough to share.”
“Nope. Go use your cash.”
I realize I sound pathetically stupid throughout this post, but it really just boils down to habit and inconvenience. We had a lovely discussion about how I’m supposed to pay bills from the checking account if I’m holding all of my cash. He stopped me from mailing fifty bucks to Verizon and had to rethink the strategy. I’ll be over here with my Visa-funded booze while he buys another dry erase board.
Lorca Damon 
My money-saving efforts entail one thing: have my own bank account. So far, I’ve put away $2000 in 2015 alone. My male is an idiot with money, and a bigger idiot when I earned it, so I make sure he can’t touch it.
Cash plans are so not practical, especially when you can check your bank statement every single day online and see where every purchase went. I’ve also discovered that men spend more every once-in-a-while than I ever spent on more frequent, smaller purchases.
And yes, drug deals go down in cash. I can’t most of my bills in cash.
Cash? I thought that was only used for drug deals.
Excellent point. I need to bring that up to my husband! You know, because I carry SOOOOO much money, I could totally get framed for being a drug dealer.
I am laughing so hard. My first husband put me on the cash plan. “What happened to the allowance I gave you.” It was $35. I had to buy our child a pair of shoes. His first ( he starting walking and I figured it was time). This was 1989 and even then the damn shoes were $40.
Family friend’s story: The husband pulled the same “you don’t know how to manage the money, I’m going to take over” situation. The parents and the three children went shopping. Each child needed a pair of dress shoes and a pair of athletic shoes for PE. At the end of the two hour expedition, the husband said, “I will never say anything about the money, but don’t ever do that to me again.” She asked what she had done, and he said, “You showed me how expensive our kids are!”
My husband occasionally complains about the spending going on around here. I usually shut him up by coming up with a spreadsheet that shows just how much money HE spends every time he walks into a grocery store vs. my Target trips.
You had me laughing…been there, done that and guess what? It didn’t work, not at all, not one bit. Hubby ran into the same problem. How were we to pay the bills, that had to paid online, or by mail with CASH? We had the cash in the house, which didn’t help the bill collectors at all. LOL
My problem is all the money is gone for the week and I have no way of knowing where it went. My husband told me to look at the receipt, and I asked, “You mean, that thing I used to spit my gum in?”
LOL Receipts??? Those are those crumbled up balls of paper on the floor of our mini-van right?