re: #176 Flying Squirrel Girl

We offer direct deposit but some people don’t have bank accounts. They don’t make a lot of money and I suspect fees and potential overdraft charges are the reason they don’t have accounts.

Banks have made the entry point to being a member of “banked” society much harder than in the past. Higher minimum deposits and minimum balances, exorbitant fees for everything, crediting deposits after debiting withdrawals (so that the bank can collect overdraft fees) — these all discourage low income workers from opening bank accounts/ But the side effect is these same workers have very little savings, if at all; find it hard to obtain favorable lending rates; and are unlikely to be able to buy their own home. And if they can manage to accumulate $20,000 for a down payment, law enforcement and the IRS will ask questions about where that money came from.

I may be looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but until the banks were deregulated, they were expected to provide financial services to everyone, and for the most part they did. You could open a passbook savings account with $5, and didn’t have to worry about the bank closing it for low activity or a low balance.