Anyone pushing for a cashless society just shows how out of touch they are with the reality for many at the lower end of the economic spectrum in this country. The idea that the many people without bank accounts are suddenly going to be able to handle a cashless system is ludicrous.
>>> Anyone pushing for a cashless society just shows how out of touch they are with the reality for many at the lower end of the economic spectrum in this country. The idea that the many people without bank accounts are suddenly going to be able to handle a cashless system is ludicrous.
That may be true for the honest, working poor. But the decreased mobility that would cause has no effect on TPTB because they’ve ensured they can still get theirs. All the burden falls to the little guy no matter what. For the holdouts who’ve been resisting so far - welcome to Big Daddy Government, just sign on the dotted line & we’ll take care of your every need, hey comrade?
The trick is to already be into a shady industry such as a coyote, drug dealer, gun runner, child pornographer... or politician... because you’ll have an automatic in.
People at the lower end of the economic spectrum should not have any problem opening a bank account unless they have a repeated history of being overdrawn, bouncing checks, writing fraudulent checks or cannot provide proper identity credentials because there are here illegally.
I found this WashingtonCompost article about some guy making 100k per year who couldn't open a bank account.
Why a guy making $100,000 a year can't get a bank account
It made it sound as if the evil banks and ChexSystems; the reporting company that bank's use to check for fraud and credit worthiness, were blacklisting Zikomo Fields for no good reason.
Fields is exactly the kind of customer banks say they want, a high earner ripe for a car loan, mortgage and all sorts of investments. But he is also among many people whom banks ignore -- because his name appears in a little-known database that tracks financial transgressions, ChexSystems.
Four years ago, Fields worked contract assignments that from time to time left him in between jobs. He said those stints of unemployment caused him to overdraw his account at U.S. Bank as he scrambled to pay bills.
"I literally had no other option but to let the account be overdrawn until I was employed again," Fields said.
He eventually wound up with a negative $1,200 balance, half of which was in overdraft fees he couldn't afford.
After five months of being in default on the account, Fields landed a job and repaid U.S. Bank. Yet it was not enough to erase the blemish on his file.
So he decided to write checks and purposely overdraft his bank account to pay his bills - in other words pay bills with money he did not have, and now it's all the banks' and ChexSystems' fault for declining to let him open up another one? Boo Hoo!
FWIW, the company I currently work for as the payroll manger, a manufacturer, just as the company Fields eventually landed a job with, makes payroll direct deposit a "condition of employment", in other words - agree to have their payroll paid via direct deposit.
We do this, not because we want to weed out employees with poor credit history (and FWIW - while we do pre-employment background checks on past employment verification, criminal background checks and for some positions, education and DMV checks - we do not do credit checks, but we also use E-Verify) but we do this because payroll direct deposit is much cheaper and more secure for us and for the employee. No hassles of handing out paper checks, the postage costs of mailing paper checks, the costs of replacing lost checks, escheating uncashed checks, the employee having their mailed payroll check stolen from their mailbox or lost in the mail, etc. We even stopped mailing direct deposit vouchers as all employees have access to their pay statements via our payroll self-service portal - at work, at home via their home computer and via a smart phone app should they choose to sign up for one.
I my five years with this company, I've never had even one employee not having or not able to open a bank account.
I would also add that the "unbanked" who receive "paper payroll checks" have to use check cashing services that charge substantial fees to cash payroll checks. So a lot of companies now, including one I worked at my previous job went with paying people without bank accounts via "pay cards".
I am not advocating for a "cashless society" per se, but people who cannot open bank accounts often cannot do so for good reasons, but not because they are on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
I will also say that I became unemployed in 2009 and was unemployed for a year and a half and I went through a bankruptcy in 2011. My bank account at its very lowest only had about $20 in it but was never overdrawn because I wrote bad checks against a negative balance, however M&T Bank closed my account and assessed me bank "fees" that cause an overdraw of about $20. I paid that off once I got back to work but I also had no problem opening a bank account, at first at a Credit Union through work at another bank.