{"id":256441,"date":"2025-11-02T00:05:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T00:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/256441\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T00:05:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T00:05:13","slug":"more-than-half-of-gen-z-says-they-only-use-cash-as-a-last-resort-and-doing-so-is-cringe-survey-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/256441\/","title":{"rendered":"More than half of Gen Z says they only use cash as ‘a last resort’ and doing so is ‘cringe,’ survey shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s only been a few years since card payments overtook using cash. This year, cash ranked as the third-most-used payment method, behind credit and debit cards, according to the Federal Reserve Financial Service\u2019s 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And Gen Zers are leading the charge in ditching paper for plastic. Results from a Cash App\/Harris Poll survey<\/a> released Thursday shows more than half of Gen Z only uses cash as a \u201clast resort\u201d when paying, and almost a third said people who pay with cash are either \u201cout of touch\u201d or \u201ccringe.\u201d The Harris Poll surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults for Cash App from Sept. 25-29.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some Gen Zers are so against using cash they\u2019ll forgo shopping from stores that are cash only, according to a 2024 Gen Z Reddit forum<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not carry my wallet with me anymore and carry my ID in my phone case. I use Apple<\/a> Pay for everything,\u201d one user wrote. \u201cThe few times I have even stood at an ATM in the past few months I have been harassed by people begging for me to withdraw cash for them, so I don\u2019t like the hassle of withdrawing money anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other younger-generation consumers say there\u2019s really no advantage to using cash and complain that getting some wastes time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy would I go to an ATM, take out cash, use that to pay, and make a note myself of what I used that cash for when I could just swipe a card?\u201d one LinkedIn<\/a> user asked<\/a> while commenting on coverage of the Cash App report.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccash usage may have reached a baseline,\u201d Kathleen Young, executive vice president and chief of FedCash Services, said in a statement. To be sure, cash still \u201cmaintains relevance due to [its] ubiquity, accessibility and resilience,\u201d she added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gen Z spending habits<\/p>\n

Not only have debit and credit card payments become more popular with Gen Z<\/a>, but so have buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) services. Yet another alternative to cash, these services like Klarna, Affirm, and PayPal\u2019s \u201cPay in 4\u201d act somewhat like credit, allowing users to pay for purchases in installments, typically with a no or low down payment. They\u2019re especially appealing to consumers who have a poor credit history, or none at all, because these companies typically only perform a soft credit check in order to approve payment installments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, Sabrina Rozza, 25, previously told Fortune\u2019s Preston Fore she used Afterpay to finance a $4,000 Dominican Republic vacation, which she called a \u201cgreat alternative\u201d to a credit card since she could make a down payment and gradually pay the rest off over the course of six months.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt definitely helped with the budgeting. And in full transparency, at the time, I wasn\u2019t making enough money to just pay it off on a credit card,\u201d she said. \u201cSo it just gave me more of, like, more leniency to afford a vacation that I really wanted to go on.\u201d<\/p>\n

And a recent J.D. Power study<\/a> shows just how popular BNPL is with the youngest generations: Nearly half (42%) of Gens Y and Z used BNPL versus 21% of consumers from other generations. But there\u2019s an inherent risk in using these services, experts say, because consumers could end up lining up so many payment installments they go broke or go into debt, just like how credit card debt can snowball<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re hearing story after story of people overextending themselves, juggling payments from various loan companies and banks,\u201d Rebecca A. Carter, a LegalShield provider lawyer with Friedman, Framme & Thrush, said in a statement. \u201cWhat many don\u2019t realize is that if you aren\u2019t disciplined about managing the payment schedules and budgeting, it can snowball quickly into a serious financial burden<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s only been a few years since card payments overtook using cash. This year, cash ranked as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[64,63,8879,21375,8884,63922,7747,203,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-256441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cash","11":"tag-consumer-spending","12":"tag-credit-cards","13":"tag-debit-cards","14":"tag-gen-z","15":"tag-mobile","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}