Other younger-generation consumers say there’s really no advantage to using cash and complain that getting some wastes time.
Of the 48 payments per month U.S. consumers make on average, just seven are cash, according to the Federal Reserve Financial Service study. That suggests “cash usage may have reached a baseline,” Kathleen Young, executive vice president and chief of FedCash Services, said in a statement. To be sure, cash still “maintains relevance due to [its] ubiquity, accessibility and resilience,” she added.
For example, Sabrina Rozza, 25, previously told Fortune’s Preston Fore she used Afterpay to finance a $4,000 Dominican Republic vacation, which she called a “great alternative” to a credit card since she could make a down payment and gradually pay the rest off over the course of six months.
“It definitely helped with the budgeting. And in full transparency, at the time, I wasn’t making enough money to just pay it off on a credit card,” she said. “So it just gave me more of, like, more leniency to afford a vacation that I really wanted to go on.”
