Increasing amount of cash. 31 October 2020 at 10:44AM in Over 50s Money Saving 7 replies 911 views

happyhacker

Wondering if I should keep more cash at home in case Banks start restricting in some way our access to our accounts.

Any feedback welcome.

Farway

Cash is always King, but in moderation.

Depends why you are concerned really, if you think your bank is the next Northern Rock or just general  Covid / Brexit worries

Either way a few hundred readies would be useful but not too much should the dog eat it

tacpot12

Another strategy would be to have a second bank account with a debit card.

Keep_pedalling

Why on earth do you think this would happen?

Katiehound

Don't tell me people are suddenly stockpiling bank notes like toilet rolls !
At present plastic is far more desirable than cash so I am not sure why you would think banks are going to hang onto your cash.
Have I missed some major announcement? (or come to that, some scaremongering false news.)

Farway

Maybe linked to talk of negative interest rates, where you pay the bank to keep your money in it

Reported when applied in some countries the sale of safes rocketed as people failed to do as clever economists predicted & spend their money on consumer goods, they just took it out of the bank & stuffed it into a safe

badmemory

I must say that rather than spend on (useless) consumer goods I think that anything I had in an account that was likely to go negative may well land up "under the mattress" if I couldn't find another more profitable home for it.  I doubt I am the only one!

MoneySeeker1

I had a couple of different reasons why I went ahead and spent (quite a bit of) money I hadn't actually got on bigger purchases for my house a couple of years back now. I went ahead and bought 2 sofas (on interest free credit) and got the new kitchen my house needed (with a loan).

Cue for me being in a position that I'd safely spent a 5 figure amount of money before Lockdown etc came along and the payments were just coming out of my bank account automatically every month. Now SHTF has happened - I paid off the balance of the two sofas with some spare income I had. The kitchen loan is rather a lot bigger than that - so am waiting for money I'm expecting to come through - and I'll then pay off the balance of that. So that money is safeguarded (against pretty much whatever might happen) and I've got the use of those things sooner than I otherwise would have by a couple of years and didn't have all the additional problems I would have had trying to get those things whilst a Lockdown is going on. The mere thought of trying to get a new kitchen done during Lockdown would give me grey hairs - if I hadn't already got them!

It was a "marathon" thing managing to get hold of the darn Barclays Partner Finance that held the two interest-free accounts for my two sofas in order to pay off the balance early - but that's another story - how I managed to get them to answer their darn phone in the end (much waste of time and temper later trying to get them to do so).

So buying things one needs/particularly wants earlier than otherwise would be the case is one way to deal with this - as long as one's income is secure enough to know it's not at the whim of whether an employer might/might not make you redundant.