Cash as a Gift

Not everyone wants or needs things, but everyone has to pay for things. I personally think that this is why cash can be a good gift if you want the highest impact on someone’s day-to-day life.

If you want to be more personalized, a gift card can help because it gives a person more constraints on how they have to use the money. This can cause the person to act in different ways than they would have otherwise, meaning they could get something or experienced something that they wouldn’t have otherwise wouldn’t have.

Giving cash itself is interesting too because of the psychological effect of immediately paying for something instead of using a card and affecting the balance of your bank account. A lot of times people have more of a scarcity mindset with a card, but taking cash out of their wallet is actually more an opportunity.

Otherwise you can also always just Venmo someone some money, Venmo has cute gift animations that you can attach to your transaction so the person doesn’t immediately see the message and amount of the transaction.