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Joint and other problems are making the nearest source of cash to be beyond my reach. Does anyone know of a company that delivers sterling to the door please? I gave up foreign travel years ago but seem to remember that this could be done for foreign currencies.
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I should have written "by courier".
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One has to ask, why do you need cash? I have had 15 quid in my wallet, untouched for about 3 months now, Everything is by card now (or paypal or google pay)
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Presumably you don’t have access to an ATM. Or not visiting any shops or supermarkets to get Cashback ?
Ask a neighbour for cash and either refund with an 9nline bank payment or write out a cheque....the very few cheques I receive these days I pay into my Santander account via the local PO which I visit every week.
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Apart from paying the window cleaner, I can't think of the last time I used cash. And even the slothful window cleaner will eventually have to move with the times as I know a fair number of people who just refuse to bother with cash at all. When we lived in the previous house, the window cleaner back then took on-line payments.
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>> Apart from paying the window cleaner, I can't >> think of the last time I used cash.
I've not used cash since last year when pubs were first closed. I guess that the smaller places prefer the the cash altetnative, though I've never asked.
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>>I've not used cash since last year when pubs were first closed.
One needs cash in Chile for the unofficial economy. Dodgy person looking after parked cars, street food, shoe polishing, street vendors, newspaper vendors, etc. etc.
It is best to use cash when in iffy situations. Taxis, markets, that sort of thing.
I deliberately pay cash when using things like food delivery services since I want to check that I actually get it, what I am getting and remain in control of payment until I'm happy. Refunds are not really a thing here.
All in all I guess on average I get through about £20 - £30 cash per week.
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In my case I have had 2 x sets of elderly neighbours in the last 50 years.
One was paid in cash and regularly came with a handful - they needed to pay car insurance, bills to pay and did not have a cheque book. I pocketed the cash and wrote a cheque.
The other person had family but they were many miles away. He would write a cheque that I gave him cash.
Both cases worked well but I knew their cheques were good , as was mine.
If you have a carer/ friend who does shopping you can get a bank card now with limited spending say £50 per day for food etc in supermarket.
Another person I knew a few years back ordered groceries from a local shop - paid by cheque on delivery and the shop owner handed out cash as well when he delivered.
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The chip shop and minicabs are the only places where I use cash nowadays.
The chip shop won't take cards and I can never get the minicab credit card machine to work - strange, that!
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One of my local takeaways will only accept cash. I used to work with the wife of an inland revenue employee who regularly ate lunch there and was instrumental in convicting them of VAT fraud. He used to pay cash, keep the receipts, which then didn't tally with the restaurant's records.
Some people never learn!
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>> The chip shop and minicabs are the only places where I use cash nowadays
Which reminds me of something filed away in my memory and undisturbed for years.
A former colleague of mine from way back became a bank manager in the Midlands. There was a period when a lot of the fish and chip shops in his area were owned by Greek Cypriots, maybe they still are. His branch had some good connections in this community and he became a bit of an expert on the finances of fish and chip shops. When considering loans to buy or improve a fish and chip business, the accounts (if there were any) were usually a waste of time - they rarely showed the business to be anything more than a hobby. The reality of course was often different.
What he needed to see was the invoices for the fish. Once he knew how much fish they bought he could work out his own accounts, because he knew how many fish they would typically get from a stone.
I believe the Inland Revenue, as it was, used the same trick if they thought somebody was taking the creative accounting too far.
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So much fish on an invoice, pay cash for the rest. Same with pies and potatoes.
Spare cash register that the manager rings up on, no records kept.
Customs and Excise had a blitz in the Midlands in the 90s on fast food establishments.
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My position is about the same as FM2R's and I find artisans doing little one-off jobs are strongly wedded to cash... Anyway, to come back to my OP, it seems that there are no suitable courier companies known to fellow posters. But surely I am right; it is (or was) possible to get foreign currencies in this way? Maybe the service was from travel companies and only available once a booking for a trip had been made.
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Back in the day American Express would deliver foreign currency. I doubt that they still do.
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About fifteen years ago I was doing grocery deliveries for a local convenience store come post office. I was asked to call in at the sorting office and pick up a package when I was passing, which I duly did. I slung it on the floor of the van and carried on with deliveries for a couple of hours, leaving the van unlocked and often with the engine running while I dealt with customers. I had no idea what was in the package (Which I hadn't even had to sign for) till I got back and the owner opened it and extracted five grand in tens and twenties.
My blood ran cold when I thought what could have happened.
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The Post Office, in collaboration with the DWP, have instituted just such a service since the onset of Covid to support the most vulnerable.
Unfortunately, there are qualification factors. The easiest to overcome is that you need to be a POCA holder (Post Office Card Account), the more difficult, and probably a blocker, is that you need to have been identified and nominated (as being in the most vulnerable of categories) by the DWP.
The Post Office have repurposed part of their "foreign exchange by post" service for this.
I wouldn't like to raise the hopes that this will be viable, but you just might want to research whether you could get yourself nominated.
I can see plenty of reference to the existence of the service, but absolutely nothing so far on how you would investigate/pursue qualification.
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>> The Post Office, in collaboration with the DWP, have instituted just such a service since
>> the onset of Covid to support the most vulnerable.
Do you have a link for that service?
In spite of the fact that I'm working on a project funded by DWP neither we nor their own staff are always aware of these sort of discrete options.
The message I'm seeing is that DWP's interaction with Post Office Card Accounts is being run down.
www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/what-to-do-now-your-post-office-card-account-is-closing
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Sun 21 Feb 21 at 14:56
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As I understand it this was not a service which could be accessed by the general public or customers. It was, perhaps is, a facility available only to the DWP who, if they had a vulnerable case, could call upon the PO to deliver cash if that case was also a PO account holder.
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>> As I understand it this was not a service which could be accessed by the
>> general public or customers. It was, perhaps is, a facility available only to the DWP
>> who, if they had a vulnerable case, could call upon the PO to deliver cash
>> if that case was also a PO account holder.
That was my conclusion; it seems to be targeted specifically at the cohort who were Shielding in lockdown 1. I don't remember hearing about it at the time though and that message is a useful starting point for further inquiries.
I think the Post Office Card Account contract with DWP is still slated to end in November. It may well be true, as the Department says that most POCA holders also have an ordinary bank account and that the unit cost of POCA is disproportionate.
Unfortunately any means of delivering money to people who haven't the facility/faculty to operate their own bank account and or who are not accepted as bank customers is going to have a high unit cost. However small a proportion of the claimant count it is those people's needs still have to be met. Thirty years ago when I worked for the Court of Protection and we were sending people their own money we used Giros at a cost I cannot now remember but was a hell of a lot more than the standard Payable Order.
We couldn't find anything better.
Something coming now uses a bar code to the payee's phone but that's still leaving a number unserved.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Sun 21 Feb 21 at 16:39
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and we were sending people their own money we used Giros
>> at a cost I cannot now remember but was a hell of a lot more
>> than the standard Payable Order.
>
That reminds me we used to be able to issue train warrants from the admin office, I don't remember the cost per ticket but it was always a very expensive cover price. Always seemed to be an open return, whatever the most expensive type of ticket was.
Anyway it was eventually binned off, cheaper to buy the ticket and claim it back.
I assume there was some charge made to the railways or the cost of the machine/warrant itself.
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>> That reminds me we used to be able to issue train warrants from the admin
>> office, I don't remember the cost per ticket but it was always a very expensive
>> cover price. Always seemed to be an open return, whatever the most expensive type of
>> ticket was.
>> Anyway it was eventually binned off, cheaper to buy the ticket and claim it back.
Same in my time. At one stage, as Admin EO, I issued (or at least signed for) the warrants.
If the person travelling asked they could be issued with a cheaper ticket and I think younger staff members (or older ones) could get a railcard discount. The paid/cancelled warrants were returned with an account for the cost of travel plus a service fee. The discovery of a cashed warrant for an annual season from Hersham to Waterloo led to a chap I'd worked with previously exiting the service. Not sure if he was prosecuted, his alcoholism should have been ringing alarm bells long before.
Restructuring of rail fares and particularly the introduction of the 'Saver' ticket led to us eventually moving to pay/reclaim.
However what goes around comes around and by the last years of my service all hotel and travel had to be booked through a central contract with Redfearn Travel. It was pretty efficient but not always as good value as a clued up individual with travel on their job description could achieve. IIRC it was also a pain booking stuff for third parties (ie admin getting tickets/accom for Judges or Quango members).
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When did you stop issueing them? I can't quite remember when we stopped, 2007 some time around them I think.
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>>However what goes around comes around and by the last years of my service all hotel and travel had to be booked through a central contract with Redfearn Travel.
Talking of commercial operations rather than the Civil Service, I always hate this approach and have removed it where possible. It is essentially stating that the direct line manager is not to be trusted with the expenses of his staff. In which case the answer is education or dismissal, not some b***** awful, one-size-fits-all, admin service.
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Talking of commercial operations rather than the Civil Service, I always hate this approach and
>> have removed it where possible. It is essentially stating that the direct line manager is
>> not to be trusted with the expenses of his staff. In which case the answer
>> is education or dismissal, not some b***** awful, one-size-fits-all, admin service.
>>
I can't say I know much about that, but a centralised system can be handy if you're booking a lot of hotel nights involving lots of people (3 figures) in a one go for the same dates, who might have god knows how many different managers. We used it a fair bit for stuff like that, but perhaps not that common in the big wide world.
Last edited by: sooty123 on Sun 21 Feb 21 at 18:18
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>> I can't say I know much about that, but a centralised system can be handy
>> if you're booking a lot of hotel nights involving lots of people (3 figures) in
>> a one go for the same dates, who might have god knows how many different
>> managers. We used it a fair bit for stuff like that, but perhaps not that
>> common in the big wide world.
Admin support for a group can be supplied in a centralised approach given the lack of admin support in individual groups these days. But Admin support is not the same as an external compulsory service which has no sight of the actual needs and simply shoehorns everybody into the same service.
Admin costs are rarely well understood, well managed or correctly valued in modern companies driven only by direct cost analysis.
p***es me right off.
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>> Back in the day American Express would deliver foreign currency. I doubt that they still
>> do.
Back in the day an acquaintance of mine was a retired inspector from the MP porn squad. He got a job with AMEX as money/traveler cheques courier, paid very well, tho was nearly always in call.
And no it wasn't through porn we became acquainted, tho it was vegetables.
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>> He got a job with AMEX as money/traveler cheques courier, paid very well, tho was nearly always in call.
It was a weird service, almost clandestine. I used it twice. In both cases a man arrived, asked for me, handed me an envelope which I had to check and sign for and then left, with barely a word.
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Perhaps it was just you ?
;-)
Last edited by: VxFan on Mon 22 Feb 21 at 03:00
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An unwillingness to be seen in public with me? That could be.
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Thanks for the Post Office link, tyred.
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You're welcome, though, as I've said, because it requires nomination by the DWP, I'm not sure it will be of any practical help.
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Anyway, yes, there was a foreign exchange company I used to deliver money to me. They used to do very good rates and no commission IIRC>
I think it lasted only about 3 or 4 years though. I don't remember the name of it and I suspect that Ambo is thinking of something more historical.
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Would Payout Now meet the OP's requirements: tinyurl.com/tafqu788
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Thanks, I will check it out. It seems still necessary to get DWP approval and, as I don't claim any benefits, it might not help.
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>> Thanks, I will check it out. It seems still necessary to get DWP approval and,
>> as I don't claim any benefits, it might not help.
So far as I can tell it's the same service that TnE mentioned, target is those who need to shield.
I assume it would include State Pension as well as disability and means tested income replacement benefits.
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Cash by post - Ambo
