Good answers here. In American English we sometimes say 'k' in place of a thousand. So you can say 'quarter million' but you can also say 250k.
In my experience 'k's use to represent one thousand in speech has almost exclusively been when talking about money but I believe it can be used appropriately for any measure in thousands, when writing. For example, I might write 100k miles but I would say 'One hundred thousand miles'. But if you asked me to quote you a price on a car I would say 'Fifty k' meaning $50,000. I could be wrong but I cannot recall anyone saying 'k' when speaking of anything but money.