Spending money today has perhaps never been easier. I don’t mean actually having spare cash to fritter (who has that, in this day and age, eh?), but the actual transaction itself.

A trip to the supermarket and I’m tapping my phone at the end to settle up and off I go. My wallet, more often than not, need never leave the house.

There’s no denying that the progress in my lifetime has been remarkable.

I grew up in an era where the cheque was king. Today you only see them in charity TV-athons when oversized ones are presented to hosts or grinning lottery winners.

But, as a youngster, having your own cheque book seemed the epitome of ‘growing up’.

Banks used to encourage kids to sign up to an account – no doubt in the hope you would stay wedded to them forever – with the lure of free gifts.

From ceramic piggy banks to pencil cases, they hunted for custom from the next generation of debtors.

More often than not it was a folder with a special holder for your cheque book and paying-in book. It was as if they all felt we were all to become organised accountants.

I didn’t much care for any of it but the cheque book was something to treasure. There was my name printed on every page. Just a signature needed.

When was the last time you had to sign for anything, with a pen, in this day and age?

Mail order goods were suddenly an option. Granted you had to wait for 28 days for anything to be delivered, but as a youngster it gave you previously inaccessible spending power. The only problem, of course, was not having very much to spend.

Pocket money rarely lent itself to a big purchase.

But sending off a cheque was considerably better than having to queue up at the Post Office for a postal order – a payment method which feels positively archaic today.

By the time you grew old enough to get a cheque-guarantee card (which basically meant you could go into a shop, pay by cheque and the retailer not have to wait days for the cheque to ‘clear’), you knew your childhood was becoming a distant memory.

And then, of course, there were credit cards.

Boy, they sounded so exciting back in the day. The postman seemed to bring a tempting stack of junk mail every day encouraging us all to sign up for thousands of pounds worth of credit.

More excitingly, if you paid in a shop with one, they’d have to run your card through a little manual machine which would print out a carbon copy of your details. You’d get handed a receipt on what felt like something resembling greaseproof paper.

Sadly, having watched my parents’ cards being used in such machines, they were being phased out by the time I made the – utterly foolish – move to having my own credit card. An expensive mistake, let me tell you, which took many years to rectify.

But then, of course, things started to change. The emergence of debit cards – something we simply take for granted today – was only the product of the late 1980s.

The fact we can now pay with our phones is almost the stuff of science fiction. I remain completely impressed every time I do it.

It’s hard to argue that the advances in banking have not been incredible over recent decades. Are they all for the good? Well, if you are a committed subscriber to the ‘cash is king’ school of thought, then the fact many of us rarely ever touch the folding stuff anymore will be something of a regret.

For the rest of us, however, feeding the capitalist machine is now a complete breeze.