Banking Fair
Banking Fair: The promise and urgency of doing postal banking right
THE IMPACT OF BEING UNBANKED & UNDERBANKED: PERSONAL STORIES
“When I had those moments where I was in and out of a bank account I would go to the liquor store to cash my check. At that time it was 2% interest if you take your check to the liquor store they would charge you 2%. So just imagine you’ve got $500 and 2% of that, so that’s like $10 right there that you’re giving somebody. If you give it 2 weeks, that’s $20 a month times 12– that’s $240 dollars that youre just giving away to somebody just to cash a check.”
“The way the major bank rips you off is through hidden fees and misrepresenting the charges or trying to make it easy for you to get an overdraft charge–or, in the case of how I got unbanked, by not paying fees that I wasn’t responsible for. That kind of thing, I just don’t expect that to happen from the government. The post office, they know what they’re doing and they get it done, so I would definitely feel safe banking with the post office.”
“Banks will engage in predatory schemes, particularly on people who cannot–who do not have any other options.[…] I think that there is a much higher level of trust in an institution [like the post office] that is going to give you financial services that is not also not attempting to steal your money as a side job.”
“$5 dollars doesn’t seem like a lot but it’s a fee that you shouldn’t have to pay for the convenience of being able to function in a society. Also, a lot of us didn’t have good credit, or our parents didn’t have good credit, because we know that credit is a luxury of having income.”
“Going to the Ace check cashing places, and going to the liquor stores and cashing my check in my active addiction, they were charging the majority of my check to cash my check, and it wasn’t enough to eat from let alone a roof over my head. The post office was my go to, because I slept right in front of the post office on Pennsylvania Avenue, so my post office was my go to for cashing checks for getting money orders, receiving money orders, and things of that nature.”
“Being underbanked was definitely quite an experience, because I didn’t grow up that way. I learned by going through that experience; I was losing a lot of money and I wasn’t making a lot of money. When you have a check that may amount to a hundred, two, three hundred dollars and you’re getting two, three, five percent of that taken, that starts adding up.”
The Post Office Can Bring People-Centered Public Banking to Every ZIP Code
The private banking industry either can’t or won’t do what needs to be done to stop preying on vulnerable people.
The Banking Fair Report
A PUBLIC OPTION IS THE ONLY WAY TO GUARANTEE UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO BASIC FINANCIAL SERVICES.
The U.S. Postal Service (“USPS” or the “Post Office”) has come under attack since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. The logic of free-market fundamentalism has tried to recast the USPS as a business, even though the agency’s public mission—guaranteed universal service at an affordable price point—was established within the first sessions of Congress at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and authority for the Postal Service was enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, where it
remains today.
