On Sunday morning, I woke up to a call we all hate to get – fraud prevention at Wells Fargo.
And while I’m not financially responsible for the few $1,000+ purchases that occurred in Green Bay Wisconsin (Weird Place for Internet Criminals?), it does mean that I will be waiting 5 – 10 business days for a new debit card to arrive in the mail.
Turning oranges into orange juice, Bryan Jowers of Giftiki suggested that I use the opportunity to test living life with just credit cards and other forms of digital payments. (Unfortunately, he did it over a large group brunch on Sunday where they wouldn’t take multiple credit cards to split our bill and ended up paying for my meal)
Thinking upfront, most of my purchases have been driven online – partially for convenience of shopping time (I like to shop really late at night) or convience of not having to move goods (without having a car in the City.)
Some examples:
- Groceries: Via Safeway Online – Once per month delivery paid online
- Clothes: Mainly Online Retailers (especially with sales.)
- Concert Tickets: My main form of nightlife which fortunately enables pre-purchase
- Assorted Books, Other Electronics: Amazon.com with Prime
The main purchases where I think I’ll run into a problem is going to be local restaurants and the small deli near my house. I already know that my favorite Burrito shop in Palo Alto is totally off limits (unless I can con someone into buying my meal ….)
Fred Wilson ran this experiment last year (and still may be) – the one addition for me is that I’m going to carry a few Square Readers with me to try and spread the Credit Card love. It’ll be interesting to hear a merchants take on Square and Credit Cards in general (plus I’d love for more merchants to take credit cards.)
I’ll put out an update post at the end of the week with progress – any purchases that haven’t worked or success stories with Square.
And let me know what you think – do you always have cash? How do you think a week or month without cash would affect your life?
