Cash Transactions...

If you are like me and like to track your expenses on a fairly regular basis, it is going to be a tough task after R2I.

In the US, I used credit cards for most of my expenses and that was very convenient. Besides the fact that you don't have to carry too much cash on you, the credit card report allowed you to track expenses by category fairly easily.

Now, I have been in Bangalore for the last 3 weeks and I have no clue how much money I have nor do I know how much I have spent, nor I do I know where I'm spending. The only thing I know is that my wallet is perpetually empty and I keep re-filling it with more money. In the hope that I don't run out of money at the most inopportune moment, I have started filling my wallet with lots more money and that is causing me to spend more money :-)

I just wish I could use credit cards everywhere. The biggest problem is that in India, there tends to be a lot of micro-transactions with folks who are ad-hoc and temporary (vegetable vendors, auto-drivers, small merchants). These folks live on a day-to-day basis and to them cash is the king, they don't believe in credit (or some form of delayed payment as with credit cards). Their business model is built on 'cash flowing through the system'.

Contrary to the popular belief that having a credit card makes you spend recklessly, in my case at-least, I would prefer credit cash to spending cash !! It does looks like there is some opportunity for mobile payments to ease out this pain, but that would require some mind-shift and change in business models.