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Crowley was happy to take credit for things humans invented, but even his imagination couldn’t have come up with the complicated global trade system they called economy. Like most things in the 21st century, money too was mostly numbers on little screens, changing owners through information web that Crowley didn’t fully understand (something he would never admit).
Secretly Crowley was sure no one fully understood the system. People were so good at pretending things made sense until everything eventually crashed without anyone having been able to predict it.
Cards, credit, debit, ATM, and whatever else was there, were the newest trend. It seemed handy to replace more inconvenient payment methods with a thin piece of plastic. Not that Crowley had ever been one to carry around cash (like Aziraphale) or worry about how to pay for something. Obviously for humans money was important. Crowley made sure people were getting paid, but the details of it didn’t concern him too much. When questioned, Hell accepted money being the root cause for quite a lot of human evil as a reason to pay humans for their services.
One time Crowley decided to try being the kind of demon who used a credit card. He had paid for a few lunches for the angel with it, but in time, it seemed like an unnecessary extra step to miracle money transfer by using a card instead of using a miracle to pay the check.
Aziraphale liked human-issued cards. All the licences and permits he had collected over the years, proofs that he was allowed to do things. Still, although Crowley knew everything the angel owned was clean and legal, he’d never seen Aziraphale pay for things with any kind of card. How he managed to deal with things like taxes and collecting rent from the shopkeepers on Whickber Street, Crowley had no idea.
Probably by nicely asking his computer to solve all that for him. Seemed like his kind of thing.
After they agreed they wanted to be us, they’d crashed into a whole new world of relationship trials. Joining the finances of two man-shaped creatures, one of whom considered money an issue for someone else, and the other who believed the banking system had been perfected in Medieval Europe but wanted to do things by the book, required a few well-placed miracles to sort out.
(“My dear, we cannot just choose a house we like and move in.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t feel like we own it. It wouldn’t feel like ours.”
“Ngk, fine.”)
The things Crowley did for his angel.
When they made an offer for a house, more of a cottage really, Aziraphale offered to pay for it. If Crowley inconspicuously miracled a few zeros to the end of the offered figure and later the payment, no one needed to know. His angel was happy, the seller was very happy, and they were free to start the rest of their existence together.
After all, it was just numbers on a screen.