What If You Paid for Everything in Cash for a Week?

We are able to effortlessly pay in a multitude ways in 2025. If you run out to grab a coffee you can use your card with chip and PIN, pay with your card contactless, and even just tap away with your phone or other device – the experience of paying with cash is now a rarity for many. The multi trillion pound payments industry is constantly innovating with new and efficient ways to help people pay for goods and services, and this has lifted expectations. We now instantly come to expect numerous, digital payment options at the point of purchase and then for these to work fluidly and 100% of the time.

However, what if we were to revert to analogue payment options? To find out, I set myself a challenge to pay everything in cash for a week. I wouldn’t use my cards, online transfers or digital devices to pay for any of my daily outgoings from Monday to Sunday. So how would my cash diet for a week go?

My one week cash challenge

To start, I decided to get cash out before abandoning my cards and digital payments for seven days. I instantly came up against a challenge, first in my local town there is only one cash point. That was the first limit but then came up against the second limit – I could only take out £250 in one day.

What happens if you only use cash? Well, you need to have good access to cash. After some research I found that with some banks you can increase this daily limit to £500 but the inflexibility would clearly be an issue. Cash machine withdrawals are in place for a clear reason, if someone stole your card and with no limits in place they could happily drain your account at their leisure. All very sensible, but for someone only living off cash for a week this would pose a problem.

In the first few days my expenses were quite low – I visited a few cafes for meetings, grabbed some bits and pieces at the local supermarket and paid the local window cleaner. These were quite easy payments to make, and I was pleasantly surprised they had change when needed, but it did put my maths to the test.

Like most people, I don’t take money for granted but when tapping away with a card or device it’s quite easy to lose track. This is the danger of impulse buying psychology, the costs can easily pile up. The cash in my wallet and the coins in my pocket meant I was up against a firmer budget than usual, so I had to keep track more regularly and I found myself often doing quick sums. Did I have enough to cover what I expected to spend? Or would I need to make my way over to my town’s only cashpoint at some point?

Disaster strikes

The challenges of not using cards became very real when my car’s front left tyre rolled over a nail on Wednesday afternoon and needed repairing. This has to be done, urgently, and at the cost of £90 + VAT. I didn’t have that amount, so needed to get quite quickly to the cashpoint. Which was broken.

With my back against the wall, I had to go to the bank – thankfully, the only branch in the local three towns that hadn’t been closed. I went in and managed to get out enough cash, then go back and pay the mechanic-on-call. This took some time and was quite stressful. The mechanic also wasn’t overjoyed at having to be paid cash as he didn’t have change and couldn’t write up a receipt manually. A hefty tip (one of the notes I managed to get from the bank) saw to this, but it wasn’t cheap.

Things got worse at the weekend. In anticipation of dinner with friends, I went to the cashpoint again on the Saturday morning which thankfully was working again. I went to take out another £250 but then I was hit with an unwelcome warning message. My cash withdrawals – on paper – were quite suspicious and my bank’s anti-fraud team had frozen my account.

What followed was less about cash as a payment solution, but more about bank customer service. I ultimately spent three hours on the phone to my bank proving who I was, explaining why I needed cash and reassuring them I wasn’t in trouble. This tried my patience but eventually I was able to get the bank to tell my local cash point that all was well. I got cash out and went out that evening but I wasn’t able to relax, I kept doing maths about how much cash I had left.

What I learnt

On Sunday night, I reflected on living on cash for a week. To my surprise I was glad to see that you could still use cash for a lot of things and – granted you were good at maths – it all worked quite seamlessly. The bigger problem was the lack of cashpoint infrastructure and overzealous anti-fraud controls about using cash. Fortunately, I could go back to card and digital payments the following day, but it’s worth thinking about those who still rely on cash.

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