A friend of mine has done something quite drastic in the management of her finances. She’s decided to go on a cash-only budget. She got rid of her investments and closed all accounts except one. I should mention that she’s retired and has no income except a monthly pension, which—by the decree of those who pay the pension—must be deposited directly into a bank account. That is one of only two reasons she keeps a checking account at all, and its balance never exceeds the $100 minimum amount required. On the day her pension is deposited, she withdraws it in cash.

I don’t know how much cash she has, but she doesn’t live like someone hovering around the poverty line, so I imagine it’s more than a little. She recently bought a car—she paid for it in cash. She has no mortgage or car payment. The only bills she has are monthly utility bills, which she pays in cash at local payment offices. The rest of her expenditures are the standard budgetary items like gas and groceries and such, and all of these are paid in cash. When she goes shopping, she takes the amount of cash she has budgeted for whatever she’s shopping for—groceries, household items, clothes, gas—and pays not a cent more than she’s budgeted; she can’t—because she has only the fixed amount of cash with her.

At the beginning of this experiment, she wrote no checks whatever. Anything she had to pay at a distance (beyond driving range), she paid with a money order, but now she simply deposits the cash needed to cover the amount she needs to pay and writes a check for exactly that amount. She writes checks very rarely—only three so far this year—has no debit or credit card, no monthly statements of any kind except an amazingly brief and simple bank statement of her tiny checking account. With no credit card, and no paypal setup of any kind, she buys nothing online.

“You’re losing interest,” somebody told her. “What interest?” she asks in reply. “How much was it—one percent or less? Consider how little that is and consider all the paperwork, credit protection—all that nonsense—and then you have to ask yourself how little you’re working for. Keeping up with all that was a part-time job.” She’s not receiving any interest, but she’s not paying any, either. Her contributions to charity are made in cash; those than can’t be made in cash get no contribution from her.

I do not know where she keeps all that cash; she said “in a safe place.” I do know she had a very sophisticated alarm system installed and she bought a gun, then took lessons in how to shoot—which she paid for in cash.

She claims her life has been simplified, that she has no worries about “the economy,” and will not consider it an issue when it comes time to vote, a fact she claims to be liberating, allowing her to vote with no potentially self-serving consideration involved. She doesn’t have to worry about how any investments might be doing because she has none. She has zero participation—either in giving or receiving—in capitalist usury. All her financial records are kept in a single envelope in that “safe place” where she keeps her cash.

She may be onto something.