Show caption Australians are increasingly reluctant to carry cash, particularly low value coins such as the five-cent piece. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters Australian economy Keep the change, please: Australians reject coins as not worth the weight Survey finds Australians lose an estimated $38m every month in change – and many are entirely relaxed about it Naaman Zhou @naamanzhou Thu 5 Oct 2017 18.00 BST Share on Facebook

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Almost all Australians – 93% – have thrown away a five-cent coin for being annoying to carry, according to a study of more than 1,000 people by the banking group ING.

The survey revealed a growing disdain for cash payments across most age groups, and said our aversion to carrying coins costs individuals up to $10 a month in lost change.

According to the researchers, Australian adults lose an estimated $38m every month, or $2.10 per person on average.

But younger Australians lose more, with 40% of millennials and 36% of Gen Xers losing $10 each month. Only 19% of those aged 50-64 lost a similar amount.



More than one in four (28%) of respondents said they hated carrying coins, and 49% said they would regularly make payments on mobile when possible.

A comparative international ING survey in February found 27% of Australians carried cash “not often” or “almost never”. Only 10% of Germans gave those responses, while the US was near the top of the cashless table at 34%. Almost one in four Australians (24%) said they would go completely cashless if they had the choice.

Reasons cited by respondents in the most recent study for binning the tiny five-cent piece included inconvenience (29%), bulking up a wallet (27%) and the simple fact that people “can’t use five cents” (40%).



But Clara Choi, a medical student at the University of Sydney, said she regularly collected coins and took them to the bank.



“I collect coins when I clean my room and deposit them at an ATM when the tin is getting heavy,” she said. “My boyfriend and I leave coins in our pockets which end up on the floor when we do the laundry.”

Despite her thrift, Choi echoed the sentiment that coins were inconvenient: “They’re only good for buying coffee.”

Another postgraduate student, Lachlan Anderson, said he preferred cash to card or phone payments.

“Call me paranoid but I don’t really like the idea of all my purchases being tracked. But I also get irritated when too many coins build up in my wallet, as it’s a literal pain in the arse.

“My usual response to this is to occasionally offload all my silver into the tip jar of whatever cafe I happen to be buying my coffee from, keeping just the precious, precious gold.

“As an Australian, this is one of the few good reasons I can think of for actually leaving a tip.”

Other young people Guardian Australia spoke to said they put their loose change in charity donation boxes or saved them for the self-service checkouts of supermarkets.

The study found that men were more careless of change than women, with a third of men losing $10 per month, compared with a quarter of women.

In February last year, the chief executive of the Royal Australian Mint, Ross MacDiarmid, said the five-cent coin was “dying a natural death” and would fade out of circulation within 10 years.

“We’ve seen a halving of the demand for five-cent pieces over the past five years and our expectation is that it will just simply progress, it’s lost its utility, it will lose interest from the public,” he said.

Last year, 22.5m five-cent coins were produced, compared with 21.2m in 2015.

A 2016 survey of consumer payments conducted by the Reserve Bank found 52% of payments were made with a card and 37% with cash. The use of cash dropped from 47% in 2013 and 69% in 2007.

The fall was across all age groups, with 51% of payments in cash by Australians over 65 in 2016, down from 78% in 2007.

Last financial year the Royal Australian Mint saw an unexpected rise in demand for coins, attributed to supply chain disruption and “higher demand in tighter economic conditions”.



Under the Currency Act, the maximum value of five-cent coins someone can hand over to a shopkeeper is $5.









