America Could Eliminate Cash and Go Digital – Episode 192

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, we have bestselling financial author, Kim Butler with us today. And we’re going to be kind of talking about some things that have happened and speculate maybe what could happen in the future. Very specifically, we’re talking about in November 2016, interestingly enough, they did it on the same day as our election, the Indian government banned cash. I mean, not all cash, but specifically 1,500 rupee notes, which sounds like a lot of money.

[01:05] But a 1,000 rupee note is worth 20 bucks and a 500 rupee note is worth 10 bucks. They did this by surprise. So in a sense, they canceled the debt that the government had to the people. And their logic behind it was that anybody who had larger than a 20 dollar note had to have it illegally or was in somehow or another involved in illegal trade is how they justified it. Kim, just get your opinion from there. Well, it is a crazy thing. And we’ve shared this information before on the podcast, but we wanted to bring it back up because there are definitely some other countries talking about doing it. And it gives rise to our clients asking questions. Well, what if they take away the dollar as a standard?

[02:02] What if they devalue it, et cetera? And these are things that are tough concepts to grasp. Number one. Number two, it’s hard to know what to do about them. And yet number three, we seek solutions. We want to be forward thinking. We don’t want to just bury our head in the sand and wake up one day in the U.S. like those that did in India with a bit of a surprise at hand. So we can jabber about them today and see if we can maybe make some sense out of them and most importantly, give you, our listeners, some concrete steps that you can take to eliminate this fear floating around in your mind, taking up space and causing you challenges. And though what we come up with may not be the best solutions, you can at least

[02:53] focus on what you can control and check off your list, the things that you can do about it, and then we’ll all go forward and figure it out the best way that we can. Todd, I bet you’ve got some suggestions. Why don’t you go ahead? Like what would you suggest knowing that this may happen to our country at some point in the future? What would you suggest people do? Well, I’d say that, you know, first of all, I’d like to mention that the other country we’re talking about is Australia, who is in the process of doing the same thing. Their dollar values would be a little bit more comparable to our own. But if we look at this idea of electronic money, it is definitely more convenient. I mean, you’re you’re not going to, you know, have, in theory, your debit card

[03:47] blow down the street or, you know, there’s limitations of being able to have it stolen. So I think electronic money is here to stay. And I’m not 100 percent sure of this, but I believe there is now more electronic money in circulation than there is physical money. Have you heard that as well? Yes, I have. In fact, Peter Diamandis, who we follow and we’ve mentioned a couple of times on our podcast, has been putting out things on Bitcoin, of course, for quite some time. Also on Ethereum, which you could say is sort of a Bitcoin competitor. And both of those businesses are supported by something called the block chain. And so if this area interests you, I highly encourage some Googling around the block chain, because whether it’s electronic money with a different name

[04:42] or Bitcoin or Ethereum, the two apparently top electronic sources of dollars, well, not dollars, sources of money right now, the block chain is what is giving legitimacy to them. And I think that there’s a lot of really exciting things available on the block chain. But to circle back to our point here, yeah, that that’s something that could possibly happen. So we want to have some concrete steps that you can do as an individual, that you can do as a family right now to address this concern. And then also just be conscious and read and listen and maybe watch video on these various subject matters so that you’re educated about them. I think the most frightening part of this that I’ve read about is that

[05:33] there are some people in our government who believe that the abolition of cash and going to all electronic funds could be used for behavioral modification. In other words, they specifically mentioned that if you have a gambling problem, you would have whatever your electronic means, whether it’s a card or a chip or whatever, would be coded so as not to allow you to purchase. They specifically mentioned being able to control tobacco by being able to control who can purchase tobacco based upon the electronic restrictions on the money itself. And to me, this is frightening. I want the freedom to use the electronic system, but I don’t want the electronic system to be able to use me. That’s really well said.

[06:34] And I agree. I’m a big proponent of not having a whole cash around. I’m the guilty party that pulled out a hundred dollar bill to pay for my kids ice cream cone one time because that’s all I had. And they ribbed me about it incessantly. And I mean, that was maybe 20 years ago and they still remember it. So, you know, ATM money, it’s just what I had with me. But the control and the gathering of information that’s necessarily occurring in the digital currency arena is a little bit concerning. But I think as in all things, we can look at, OK, what’s good here? What can we do that we can control? What’s the positive aspects? And so, OK, I’ll have to admit, if somebody defines X habit as negative,

[07:25] then maybe that could be helpful to have the control. I’m just not always like you, sure, the government should be the one controlling it. But I’m also a big believer in entrepreneurial ingenuity. And that, to me, just means entrepreneurs, people that are sinking outside the box, they’re opening the envelopes, they’re pushing the edges are often very ingenious in coming up with ways to take a bad situation, make it better, take a situation that appears to be spiraling out of our control and potentially pull it back into our control, etc. And so I’m going to trust that that’s going to happen and that the powers that be, if you will, the government is going to do whatever they feel is best. But that us as entrepreneurs, us as users, us as people, citizens, if you will,

[08:18] we have ways around it. You know, you could always just trade for everything in your local community. As an example, for ways to, quote, get out of government scrutiny. But at the risk of becoming too much of a conspiracy theorist on this subject, Todd, I want to give you a chance to just identify two or three things that you would do to help solve these concerns for people, for yourself. Everybody’s got their own thing that they would do. So I’m just curious what those some of those are for you. But first of all, I have to share this story with you. And this particular article quoted that there is no need for a hundred dollar bill and that 70 percent of hundred dollar bills are involved in criminal activity,

[09:07] particularly owned by drug dealers. So that goes well with your ice cream story. Yes. Well, I live on a farm, but we don’t grow marijuana. All right. So what’s on your list? You know, I suppose my list is that, you know, we as a as a this country was settled based upon opportunity, not upon guarantees. And I think we need to fight the opportunity to fail, fight the opportunity to smoke cigarettes if we want to. I’ve never actually smoked a cigarette in my entire life, but I just am so worried that we can end up being the country that we left. Yes. Yes, that is definitely an interesting challenge. Well, I love what you brought up. And it’s that we continually need to be focused on our thinking

[10:15] because that is absolutely something that we can control. And yes, failure creates good thinking. It causes you to figure out a way around, figure out potentially what went wrong, figure out what you can do better to turn your brain on and think through a situation and not just be constantly going with the flow. So, yeah, we could absolutely put that on our list. In fact, there’s a lot of studies coming out that are showing that the kids these days in their little what’s the trophy generation, I think, is the term because they’re not being allowed to fail. They’re not getting some good learning out of that. So if that means that our dollar has to fill, OK, fine. If that means that our government structure has to fail, OK, fine.

[10:59] If that means that we have some other banking or mortgage institution that we could all argue should have failed in 08 and 09, OK, fine. Let’s figure out a way around it. But I want to lay out just from my family’s standpoint two or three things that people can do that are hardline items. Like, I got this and I checked it off and now I’m a little less worried about them taking all my hundred dollar bills away or what have you. And it’s simple activities that any family can do. It includes storing water, storing food and storing power. So you can grab an extra flat of water bottles every time you go to the grocery store, throw them in the basement, throw them in the trunk of your car, throw them wherever they can be

[11:44] stored for a while. And just if you did that every time or every other time you went to the grocery store, pretty quickly you’d end up with a bunch of extra water. That’s going to be valuable. The things that are tradable, that are usable are valuable. And same with food. If you just bought a few extra cans of tuna or salmon or whatever your item of choice is, just buy a few extra cans every time you go to the store. Or you could even step it up a notch and get onto the sites that support the Mormon faith. They have all kinds of food storage. You can buy these buckets of ready-made food. It’s kind of like camping food. And you can put those in the basement. There’s seeds that you can store in your freezer.

[12:28] Planting a garden is no easy chore, but you could just store the seeds. Those are going to be valuable. And these are the kinds of things that you can absolutely act on and then check off your list and be done with them. And then I indicated the power. So maybe right now it’s just candles and batteries and flashlights and things like that. But I think in time it could be some form of solar power. They have these cool things back to the camping stores. It’s kind of like a piece of cloth that you lay out and it charges your cell phone while you’re hiking and that kind of thing. Grab some of those and just feel better about the power that charges the things that are important to you. So again, the cell phones or what have you

[13:13] or potentially even go as far as looking into solar panels on your roof or whatever the thing is that is going to help you feel better about having the ability to generate electricity, which of course then keeps you in touch with other family members, especially if they don’t live in your area. And those are just three easy, simple things that you can do without a lot of money, without a lot of time, and I believe are going to prepare you for anything that goes bump in the night, if you will, better than a lot of some of the other strategies that I hear people talking about, which may be valuable, but really are just not feasible for every family to do. I would have to add that to passionately continue

[13:56] to create value in the way in which you were called would be added to the list. Absolutely. I was just chatting with somebody briefly over the weekend that is sort of a friend of a friend, something we don’t know super well, but she’s just in a very changed situation in life. The details are not important right now. And I was disappointed in myself that I didn’t have the guts to say to her as she was complaining about not having really much to focus on. Then find something and volunteer until you find something that just really serves you well, that you get so much joy out of that you would actually go do it every day and not get paid for it, which is kind of what volunteering is. And that’s tough.

[14:42] She’s in a situation where it’s hard to get up and just face life every day, but she can. And so to choose to do that is such an important thing. And like I said, I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t have the guts to go ahead and say that to her instead of just sort of agreeing with her plight in life that is chosen. It’s a mental and physical choice that she’s making. And we all can do better in that area. And just by being conscious of the choices that we’re making. And believe me, I mess up my choices too. But when we can talk about them, put them out on the table, discuss them, help each other get better at them, that’s when real progress can occur. I wish I knew who to properly credit this to,

[15:24] but I was told once that no problem on earth exists without the person present to solve it. That’s pretty interesting. Yeah, I think we can go with that because think about some of the amazing problems that are being solved by young entrepreneurs these days. I mean, you’re hearing incredible things happening by your classic kid in his mother’s basement. And that is cool. And we need to celebrate those successes without a doubt. So let’s end this on a positive note. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, this has been the Prosperity Podcast. Thanks, Kim Butler. And please keep your questions and your comments coming. We love to read every single one of them. Take care, everybody. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast.

[16:21] To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.