Invisible Money

June 4, 2008 at 8:46 pm · Filed under money

It seems to me that money is so invisible now. When I get paid, I see it as a number online. When I pay someone else, it’s a swipe of the credit card and numbers get deducted. Very rarely do I pay with cash. When I fund my online accounts, I click my mouse and tap the keys on my keyboard and the number in one bank account goes down while the number in another bank account goes up. In my investments, my portfolio worth is just numbers fluctuating depending on what price people are buying and selling at.

When I do pay in cash, it disappears from my wallet into a cash register into a bank account where the paper is converted to 1s and 0s in some computer somewhere. It’s almost as if my cash disappears and sometimes I wonder where it goes and if it’s ever going to appear again, holding my breath like an audience of one watching a magic trick that hasn’t quite finished yet.

Wouldn’t it be strange if we just woke up one day and found that all the money had disappeared and instead all we had were numbers. I pay you a certain number and you sell me something for a certain number and my value is a certain number but there was absolutely no physical object to back it up with. Then, if all the data got erased (a la Fight Club), what would we really be worth? Would we all start back to zero? Would everything be a blank slate again?

Yes, I know that’s a bit dramatic but it’s the what-ifs rather than reality itself that can really show what the underpinnings of reality is really made of.

[edit: this article was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance 3rd Anniversary edition!  To check out more good reading, go here.]

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