bill hardekopf - columnist in forbes & the christian science monitor and ceo of lowcards.com has written about this study. bill how does cash cost us? 200 billion is a big figure. break it down for us to the individual or the household. > >well, 200 billion is a huge figure bill. it averages $1739 per household. and that's a lot of money that carrying cash can cost each american. > >help me understand this. how is it costing us? > >there are a number of factors that go into it. some of it is theft. some of it is the atm fees that we all have to pay when we go out of network to use our atm cards. but the majority of it surprisingly is the time that it takes us to get cash. the time that it takes us to go to those atm machines or to the banks. everybody has a cost for each of the minutes and hours that they spend. and the cost of getting our cash is actually what's costing us the majority of that 200 billion dollars. > >i guess some of this over time will be obviated once we get our cell phones up to speed and we can use them as a substitute for cash. but in terms of fees outside of the ou