20 Ways People Paid Their Bills Before Credit Cards Existed

In 1928, Farrington Manufacturing invented and trademarked the Charga-Plate, a small, two-and-a-half-by-one-and-a-quarter-inch, stamped piece of steel or aluminum. Unlike the plastic cards we know today, clerks would put the metal plate along with a paper sales slip and an inked ribbon into a mechanical tabletop press. The press would stamp all three items together, imprinting the customer’s details onto the slip. It was the next step after the metal-charge coins that had been used since the 1860s.

The hazelwood tally sticks were a method of recording a debt, used in 12th-century England when they were formalized by King Henry I. A notch would be cut in the stick, then it was split lengthwise. The debtor kept the short half, called the foil; the creditor kept the longer half, called the stock, which could be traded as an IOU, because the matching grain of the two halves meant it was impossible to forge. The tally-stick system was abolished by Parliament in 1826. And eight years later, workers burned the retired tally sticks under the House of Lords, which started the fire that destroyed the Palace of Westminster.

Sometime around 600 BC, in the Kingdom of Lydia (now Turkey), officials started pressing official royal stamps on blobs of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, to guarantee its worth and authenticity and save the merchant from having to test the metal in every transaction. Most historians think the Lydians were the first to introduce standardized state coinage.

The wampum, polished shell beads used by Native Americans for diplomatic and ceremonial purposes, such as treaty belts, was never intended for circulation as everyday currency. But due to a shortage of coins, the English and Dutch settlers of North America began to use them in trade. In 1637, the Massachusetts Bay Colony made wampum legal tender for settling small debts and established an exchange rate; for example, six white beads were worth one English penny. An artifact of ritual and reverence became currency.

The dried, counted cacao bean (the raw seed, not chocolate), was common small change for the Maya and Aztec. Aztec-era market lists reveal three beans for an avocado, 100 for a turkey hen. Tax collectors collected the empires’ revenue in sacks of 8,000 beans called xiquipilli. There were even forgers who hollowed out bean shells and filled them with dirt to create fake coins.

As the nation approached the Civil War in the early 1860s, citizens were stockpiling metal coins in their pockets, which left very little for small transactions. John Gault, a New York businessman, addressed the change problem by patenting, in 1862, a device that sealed real U.S. postage stamps in tiny brass frames with a mica covering, with merchant advertisements printed on the reverse. About 750,000 of Gault’s encased stamps, made from postage that Congress had approved for settling small debts, circulated as accepted currency.

In 1891, Marcellus Berry, who worked for American Express, introduced the first traveler’s check. Purchasers paid cash for the checks and signed them once when they were purchased, and a second time when they gave them to the merchants. If both signatures matched, that was proof that the bearer was the right person. If the checks were lost or stolen, they were completely replaced by the company. In essence, the traveler’s check offered the security of a modern card without any borrowing at all, since the buyer had already paid in full at purchase.

From the 1880s to the 1950s, a number of isolated American coal mines paid workers in stamped metal tokens or paper scrip that were redeemable only at the company store. Scrip was meant to serve as a temporary means of payment between regular monthly cash paydays. But it could still leave families in significant debt due to inflated store prices, even though their monthly cash pay, after store deductions, was often thin.

Until the start of the 20th century, money in many parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific consisted of shells gathered from the Indian Ocean, particularly Monetaria moneta (the cowrie), which circulated as currency from about 1600 BC. The uniformity of their size and strength meant that they were difficult to forge, easy to carry, and therefore capable of settling debts between disparate cultures and economies over thousands of years.

Notgeld is German for emergency money. It was issued by local governments and businesses during severe coin shortages in World War I (1914–1918) and the hyperinflation that followed, lasting into 1923. Metal coins were withdrawn from circulation, and locals began printing Notgeld on anything they could find, from paper and silk to linen, leather, and even wood veneer. Though Notgeld lacked official national legal-tender status, local merchants agreed to accept it as payment in lieu of official government currency, which had become worthless or scarce.

In 1619, Virginia legalized the use of dried tobacco as payment (for three shillings a pound). However, the settlers found that carrying tobacco to settle each purchase was not very feasible, so in 1727 the colony built government-run inspection warehouses where farmers could store their tobacco and get tobacco notes in return. Those notes were fully redeemable for tobacco, meaning they were paper currency before there was even a bank in Virginia.

Back in the day, shopkeepers in Europe and North America had notebooks with the names of neighborhood customers and the items they bought on credit. Customers paid off these debts periodically, usually weekly or monthly, but sometimes after harvest. They might have paid in cash, farm goods, or sweat equity. This whole system was built on individual reputations and shop owners keeping track of whom they could trust to pay.

During the 12th-14th centuries, Italian merchant bankers invented the lettera di cambio (letter of exchange), a written document that circulated from person to person. If a merchant deposited money in one city, he could collect its equivalent in local currency at another, which saved the trouble (and risk) of lugging gold along dangerous roads. And it allowed bankers to skirt the Church’s ban on lending with interest.

The paper check goes back to the sakk, the written drafts of payment used by 9th-century Islamic bankers. The modern version was created by English goldsmith-bankers in the 17th and 18th centuries: a signed order from one person requesting a bank to release a specific sum of money from the drawer’s account to a particular person. The drawer here is the person whose account the money comes from.

In the Free Banking Era in America (1837-1863), there were hundreds of privately owned, state-chartered banks that each printed their own paper money, which was redeemable for gold or silver coin. The “good” notes were traded at par value, meaning their full stated value, while the notes from the wildcat banks (typically those in remote areas and with very little capitalization) were sold at a discount, and merchants carried “booklets” called banknote detectors to calculate the differences.

Before coins were widely used, merchants in the ancient Near East and in Viking-Age Scandinavia paid in hacksilver, pieces of jewelry, bars, or ingots that had been cut into smaller pieces. The buyer and seller would weigh these bits of hacksilver on a set of portable balance scales and standard weights made of stone. Value was measured by weight, not by a specific amount.

Small metal or celluloid discs marked with the customer’s account number were handed out by department stores, oil companies, and hotels between the 1860s and 1920s. Presenting one at the time of sale allowed shopkeepers to record the transaction on the customer’s store account. The system predated the Charge-Plate of 1928, though it was less sophisticated than its embossed successor.

In 1838, Britain’s Post Office launched the postal money order, followed by the U.S. Post Office in 1864. Customers bought drafts at the post office with cash. The draft could then safely travel by mail to a distant vendor and be cashed upon its arrival. This allowed mail-order houses such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. to flourish in the latter half of the 19th century.

Locals in Ethiopia used amole, hand-carved, ten-inch-long bars of rock salt, to buy and sell goods and even pay their taxes from at least as early as the 6th century CE up until the 20th century. Locals wrapped the amole bars up and protected them on the long journeys along trading routes, because the salt itself was the good being traded.

During China’s Tang Dynasty, merchants developed a paper certificate called feiqian (“flying cash”), which enabled them to carry wealth without having to lug around bundles of iron coins strung together. The government of the Song Dynasty adopted the concept throughout Sichuan province in 1024 CE, producing the first official, government-backed paper currency in the world. Marco Polo didn’t invent it. He just witnessed its use in China and brought the story of circulating paper money back to Europe.

This content was created with the help of AI.