I personally find the whole idea of keeping physical cash in the home, quite scary. And there will be folks who keep hundreds of pounds in cash in the home. Criminals aren’t completely stupid, they often exploit the poorest in their own communities, targeting those with the least secure homes because even they know they’re easy pickings. Keeping £300 in a teapot on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet is too stupid for words, but people do it.
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It’s very common for pensioners to lift their entire pension in the post office which is around £800 these days. Why there aren’t loads of them getting mugged, I don’t know.
Heard recently of someone who was getting some building work done so had getting on for £20,000 in the house!
And it’s worth saying, if they were burgled and that amount of cash was stolen, they’d be buggered because I believe most home insurance policies will only pay out around £750 for cash loss. I personally know of a couple who were burgled, reported it to the police and they alleged they had £5k stolen from where they’d hidden it in their bedroom. They got nothing back because they couldn’t prove they ever had the money in the first place.
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Seems like use case one of e-Money
Do you have any evidence for that? All the state pensioners that I know have it paid into their bank accounts.
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They all have it paid into their bank accounts simply because the pension books and cheques were stopped quite a while back and the post office account in the last year or two. However, I’ve seen the queues on the pension days and, yes, many of them just lift the lot. Likewise for child benefit for that matter.
I think they lift it weekly just as they did in the days of pension books. Post offices get extra cash deliveries on those days to allow for this.
In our area, you know pension day as the pensioners are all lined up at the post office well before it opens.
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Sorry, but that’s just speculation, not evidence. I’d like to see some actual figures 
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Well, long time ago I used to be in charge of the pensions IT system and the post offices knew then that they needed way more cash on pension day. It’s not as bad now as it was then but there are still queues of pensioners outside post offices over here on pension day and, more rarely, mothers on child benefit day too.
The newer pensioners are more used to having been paid their salary into the bank so fewer of the newer ones lift it that way but the older ones definitely do. Also, the older ones (and the canny new pensioners) are paid weekly rather than four weekly, hence the weekly lines of largely older pensioners.
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Pardon me, @arnie7, but do you mean in the UK?
I’m trying to picture the generality of queues of pensioners waiting for the doors to unlock.
I’d be more inclined to accept that pensioners take a bunch of cash on pension day, but not so much a preponderance of them taking the lot. I’d expect the post office staff to be vigorously advising against it…
Yes, in the UK. Well, here in NI and, I suspect, Scotland. Not in city centre post offices that I’ve seen but very common in the suburbs. Not sure about country offices these days as I don’t see them so much but used to be common in villages too.
Not really. This custom started in the days of pension books when you couldn’t do anything else but take the value of the coupon for that week in your book. It moved on to the post office account when the books stopped a lot of years back. Some people received cheques (well, technically payable orders) and equally you could only take the full value of those too.
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Yes, in those days I worked for a local authority in a large city in the North of England, dealing with Housing Benefit applications (and occasionally fraud). I visited mainly pensioners and, even in those days, their pension (after cash that was needed day to day) went in the building society or bank. I very rarely came across people hoarding large amounts of cash at home. When I did, there were usually other issues involved, such as physical or mental health.
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Not for here, I know, but I’m curious to know just what skills we’ve got in aggregate across this forum. 
Just curious…. (Maybe a topic for a Saturday 
).
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On a side note, the machines that produced cheques were based on those that they used to produce pension books. As a consequence, when the DHSS wanted a new feature like, for example, being able to insert a note in amongst the pension coupons, you’d see that appearing in cheque books a number of years later. That’s how come adverts appeared in amongst your cheques a while back (not all banks splashed out on new chequebook machines of course).
Fantastic to see it in operation. Basically a horseshoe shape with the raw materials going in at several stages (wire for the staples, the coupons, cover, etc.) and the books popping out the other end.
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I worked in a DHSS office in the mid-1980s where those books were produced - it was a wonderfully Heath Robinsonesque contraption that printed out and stapled the books.
I honestly don’t understand why people feel money in the hand is any less viable to be spent, than money on a card, particularly in days of instant transfers. £10 on a card or a £10 note, I don’t feel any more or less likely to spend it.
But I am not everybody. I DO think it’s wrong to argue the case for cash in terms of “people who have difficulties managing finances need it” or “it’s easier to give tips in cash” - which are both marginal side cases to my mind
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Why would they have showed you their stashes of cash, if they had them?
Surely you’d have been the last person they’d have showed it to!
My paternal grandparents, both now deceased, kept a Quality Street tin (an old, larger, pre-shrinkflation one!) stuffed absolutely full of £50 notes. Not benefits fraud, just some bizarre rainy day behaviour; perhaps a bit of banking distrust.
It all became something of a debacle when my grandfather went in to full time care and my grandmother gradually started to fall to Alzheimer’s, as said Quality Street tin would quite often end up thrown in the bin… but neither party could be convinced that it was a better idea to bank it.
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Damn it - why didn’t I think of that? All that training gone to waste…
So you’re telling me you checked for Quality Street tins tucked away in cloak or airing cupboards as part of these Housing Benefit claims?
I’m not telling you anything - you have clearly already made up your mind about a difficult and sensitive job that I did 40 years ago. I’m going to leave it at that.
I clearly have done no such thing and I’d like to know how you’d be able to deduce my grandparents had a Quality Street tin full of banknotes if their claim came across your desk 40 years ago.
You would know they held the cash if they declared it. You wouldn’t know definitely that they didn’t if it wasn’t declared, you’d be taking that on trust. I put it to you that some people, less honest than my departed grandparents of course, would conveniently forget about that Quality Street tin while filling the form in.