Well, here’s a by-product of the COVID-19 lockdowns that no one saw coming. It turns out we rekindled our love of cash — cold, hard currency in your wallet cash.
A report from RBC Royal Bank says despite the movement towards e-commerce and electronic transactions, which reduce the need to carry money in our pockets, demand for cash rose 60 per cent through the pandemic.
It wasn’t so much that we paid for more things with cash, we used to fill our savings accounts.
The combination of cyber-security and the potential of tying up the electronic e-commerce system, low interest rates and fears about the geopolitical situation prompted us to go back to that good, old-fashioned way of preserving value — cash.
Our great grandparents may not have trusted the banking system and opted to put their savings in a tobacco can under the corner fence post or under a mattress.
However, given that through the pandemic more of us found our way back to the security of actual cash, our ancestors ideas may not be as far-fetched as it might have seemed a couple years back.
