Cash is still king

We said goodbye to the Golden Stratus last week. The 2005 Dodge Stratus that was supposed to last through all three teenage drivers in our household was hauled away to the scrapyard.

I bought that car with cash from an older gentleman when I was driving to Jamestown for work over 10 years ago. I was looking for something inexpensive that had better gas mileage than my 4x4 SUV, knowing that it would put on many highway miles.

When I started working in New Rockford again, my husband and I told the kids that the Stratus would be their car when they got their licenses.

We’ve made many repairs to it over the years, and I even backed into it with our pickup once. I joked several times that it was a lemon, and that’s probably true considering it had maybe 130,000 miles on it at the time of its death.

Our girls were sad. They both said it was fun to drive, even though you couldn’t open the driver’s side window at all, and you could only open the passenger door from the inside. My son wouldn’t know, because he didn’t get the chance to get behind the wheel.

It wasn’t the first time I bought a vehicle with cash though. My very first car was a 1979 Dodge Magnum, an absolute tank we dubbed the “Silver Bullet” for obvious reasons. The ice blue and gray floral upholstery had a retro vibe, and it was mine, free and clear.

Buying vehicles with cash is satisfying. You set aside some money for the guaranteed eventual repairs, and coast along paying for only gas (which was 93 cents per gallon when I bought my first car).

My husband and I also paid for our entire wedding with cash. We socked away funds for more than a year, keeping it all in a small fireproof safe in the bedroom of our 400 sq. ft. apartment. We used what was left to cover food, entertainment and souvenirs while on our honeymoon in Florida.

Now the only thing I have enough cash to buy is lunch, sometimes. With three teenagers, I’m always handing out greenbacks: a $50 bill here and my last five ones there.

“Mom, do you mind if I steal cash from your purse to go get some exfoliating body scrub from Dollar General?”

“Track picture orders are due today. Do you have $40 so I can get a memory mate and a few fridge magnets?” Easy come, easy go.

My husband still somehow manages to set aside cash, and it sure is helpful when we get in a pinch.

Now my middle child is following in our footsteps. She began what’s called cash stuffing as soon as she had her first job. She bought a binder with several pockets, and she counts out her tip money and puts the bills into different areas of the binder labeled for the money’s intended use.

I remember my grandma using a binder like that for coupons. She spent hours clipping them from the daily newspapers and Better Homes and Gardens magazine so she could save 40 cents on Lucky Charms and get 23 cents off a package of Fig Newtons. I was more interested in sending in a proof of purchase from a package of Flintstone vitamins and 79 cents in order to get a free Flintstones hot cocoa mug. Except we didn’t buy vitamins.

Apparently “cash stuffing” is back with a vengeance, particularly among young people. According to U.S. News and World Report, cash stuffing can be a great way to budget and spend money “because it helps curb compulsive spending and racking up credit card debt.”

The most common method is zero-based budgeting, where you start with the total amount of your paycheck and count all the way down to zero to determine how each dollar will be spent. Monthly bills are counted out first, savings is set aside, then the funds to cover various expenses are divided up.

“So, for Gen Zers, cash stuffing is an excellent method to build good financial habits that they can carry over for the rest of their lives, even if they switch to predominantly digital payment methods and start using credit cards,” says Lyle Solomon, a consumer finance lawyer and principal attorney at Oak View Law Group in Auburn, California.

One young woman started a business called Baddies and Budgets to provide services to cash stuffers around the world.

In the spring of 2021, Jasmine Taylor of Amarillo, Texas, used her $1,200 stimulus check to set up a Shopify account, purchase shipping supplies and material for cash-stuffing wallets. She splurged on a Cricut machine, and offered to personalize her fun wallets and binders with labels for each category a person wants to set aside funds.

Taylor also sells online budgeting courses and other budgeting tools. Her package of digital downloads she calls “Baddie’s Savings Challenges” helps customers save for everything from buying a new cell phone to socking away cash to pay off thousands in credit card debt.

My version of cash stuffing is watching the customer service rep at Community Credit Union shove cash from my paycheck into one of their green and white envelopes. It’s apparently labeled “for anything and everything” because it’s the first thing the kids look for every time they need cash, whether it’s a fiver for a hot dog and seeds at the baseball game or a 20-spot for a haircut at the salon.

Teaching kids about budgeting, saving and managing their finances is important. Those skills they learn as youth will (hopefully) stay with them for life.

April is Financial Literacy Month, and I appreciate the efforts our schools and communities are undertaking to make kids more money savvy. NDSU Extension Service provides programming to youth, particularly through their cute “Piggy Bank Pageant” spending and savings curriculum for first graders. If you haven’t already, go to a bank or credit union in Carrington and New Rockford to learn about what they’re saving for and drop a few spare pennies into your favorite first grader’s piggy bank.

I’m encouraged that Carrington High School is adding Consumer Math back, and making it an option for earning one of the three math credits required to graduate. Did you know that the most recent curriculum they could find was published in 1996, and that they’re now building their own from scratch? It sounds like we all need to get back to the basics if we want our kids to be financially independent as adults.

Now, if we could just get our daughters to reconcile their bank accounts. There’s no need, they say, because they can just check the balance on their phone app at 3 a.m. if they want. That’s a topic for another column.