My money consists mostly of tiny black illuminated numbers on a computer screen and a plastic card I wave around in exchange for goods. Sometimes I’ll get a letter in the mail and my money numbers will be printed on an official piece of paper, but these balance numbers will be old and inaccurate. It’s far better to use a computer or phone to interact with my money. It’s phantom money after all. It shoots around the world at the speed of light—or as fast as my internet connection allows—filling the digital coffers of corporations and banks in the form of illuminated digits that shift and move like the ever-changing surface of a sea. The reality of my phantom money is that it never gets more tangible than the wind. Like the wind, I can’t see my cash money, but I can feel it.

On rare occasions, I handle my money in the inconvenient physical form of cash. I sometimes keep a few ancient greenbacks in my wallet for emergencies or in case the ice cream truck rolls around for my daughters, but other than that, my money is not physical. I prefer my money to be in its latent form. It’s easier for everyone that way.

This recent pandemic of ours further emphasized the inconvenience of unwieldy cash. In the time of social distancing and mask-wearing, who wants to handle the physical form of money? Memories of my childhood arise and I can hear my mother telling me to wash my hands because I was just touching money. I think my union hall may be the last remaining entity in my life that has resisted online payment. I even asked my local union’s receptionist once why they don’t have an online payment system after a frustratingly long wait to get someone to answer the phone.

“Because I’d be out of a job, that’s why.” She replied in the kind yet firm tone adults use to explain things of great importance to children.

Okay, I respect that.

When I was a boy, my parents always had a few emergency dollars floating around in the glove box of their car, right next to the worn and misfolded map used for directions. Quarters and dimes for payphones and parking meters filled our vehicle’s cup holders and pants pockets. What a different life! A life where only idiots didn’t carry cash. These days, I can’t remember the last time I had to memorize my gas pump number so I could hurriedly run inside to put money on a pump. Last night, my daughter lost her tooth and I had to scramble around the house looking for a dollar bill I could leave under her pillow. I searched junk drawers, wallets, my cars…and my search came up empty. I contemplated using the cup of coins my wife keeps in the laundry room to fill a zip lock bag of change. Ironically, I discovered my 7-year-old daughter is the only person in my household who regularly carries cash in her little plastic Totoro wallet. $25 dollars I found tucked away in there. The tooth fairy had to resort to borrowing cash from her to pay her for the tooth.

Some tooth fairy, huh?

I’ve come to realize that, for me, my money has more in common with a pleasant beam of sunshine than any real piece of paper or metal coin.

I find it fantastic that we live in a world like this. A world where electronic numbers on a screen dictate whether we are wealthy or poor or where we can go or what we can do. Our complex world works because enough of us believe that these numbers on a screen are actually keys that unlock doors. How is it that people haven’t figured out a way to hack into this precious system or start to question it? Who keeps track of all these ones and zeroes flying around online networks? And why doesn’t the tooth fairy carry cash anymore?

How Did our Money Turn Latent?

Our society was heading this way for some time. The first step was a bill that passed in 1933 called the Emergency Banking Act. It guaranteed that your money was safe in an approved bank via an insurance program backed by the federal reserve. The bill was a direct result of the 1929 stock market crash and the run on banks that occurred thereafter. People were rightfully scared to keep their money in banks and would rather hide their sacred cash under their mattress or in a hole in the yard.

Secondly, in 1944, a handful of countries met in the New Hampshire town of Bretton Woods to establish a set of rules for international monetary relations. A major element of the Bretton Woods Agreement was that the US promised to back the price of the dollar overseas with gold. Other countries’ currencies then based their value against the US dollar. This ended up becoming an extremely unfair system benefiting only the United States. The French labeled this as the “exorbitant privilege” and a handful of European countries would later call this system’s gold bluff.

The third step happened in 1971 by a series of actions called the Nixon Shock. This is when the gold standard was dropped. Other countries began to demand that they received gold for their American dollars per the guarantee of the Bretton Woods Agreement, and America paid hundreds of millions in gold but in turn, the gold standard and Bretton Woods System were abandoned. In its place, a promise was made that the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government backs our money…not the price of gold or silver. The name for this system of currency is called fiat money.

Finally, the backbone of our cashless world rests on the 1979 Electronic Fund Transfer Act. This law and its rules are what protect us while using any form of electronic non-physical cash form of payment. These EFT transfers are made on special banking system networks with names like the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) systems and others. Any time we click buy or pay a bill online we are conducting an EFT. When we get direct deposit paychecks we are beneficiaries of an ACH transfer.

Belief Systems

Faith in the government is what gives our money value. There is no tangible value our money represents other than its scarcity and the hope that the government does not overprint this fiat money. It’s a faith-based system, whether we are religious or not, we all believe in this religion of money. There is no other choice.

I can’t imagine the fear that people experienced during the bank runs of the early depression years. Can you imagine going to the bank to get your money and them apologizing because they ran out of cash? I can’t. It doesn’t sound real. But that happened less than a hundred years ago in this country.

Can there ever be another systematic banking crisis like the depression era bank runs that would throw all of us into a panic? We see what panic does to toilet paper, imagine if it were currency people were panicking about. We don’t believe that this can happen, because our belief is so strong. Which I think is a good thing.

I trust my money is nice and safe in the cloud and computer hard drives of our hight tech banking systems. I wonder what’s next for our fiat “phantom” money system. Facial recognition systems and the death of physical credit and debit cards? When I think back to the life my parents lived when they were my age, I can’t help but wonder what out of date technologies my children will be talking about when they are my age. Will my daughters laugh thinking of the way I carried a phone around in my pocket or a plastic credit card to pay for things?

I love ghost money

I, for one, truly enjoy the convenience in which I handle money these days. No more worrying about loose change or having enough cash or getting robbed with sums of cash on me. The last time someone gained access to my account they fraudulently purchased $400 worth of gas all over Ohio. Wells Fargo reimbursed me the next day. I’m sure if I’d been physically robbed of cash, the police wouldn’t reimburse me after filing a police report.

No more standing in line to deposit my check at the bank every Friday. I can’t even remember the last time I stepped foot in my bank. Hell, I don’t even manually pay the majority of my bills and investment purchases. I use autopay. And I’m on the way to “automating” my income once I can save enough to live by the 4% rule. Soon my money life will be as close to autopilot as I can arrange it in this current age. The closer I get to this zen state of automatic money transfer enlightenment, the more I can focus on enjoying pleasant beams of sunshine and maybe finding a need to carry and use more cash in my daily life.

More cash?

Yes. Cash isn’t all bad. Now that I’m thinking of it, the best things I’ve ever purchased in my life have been with cash and cost no more than a few bucks. Hot al pastor tacos in Mexico City. Char Kway Teow at a steamy hawker stall in Penang. Burning hot dumplings on a frozen Beijing street corner. The excited look in my daughter’s eyes at an idling ice cream truck in front of my house. In these cases, cash is priceless. Cash is divine.

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