Its hard to believe that around six percent of the population in the United States does not have any money or funds of any type in any sort of bank. I guess they are reverting back to the old school method of storing your cash under the bed. I mean when you here the number “seventeen million” it really hits home, that a lot of people just do not have enough money to even consider having an account. We also see that one quarter of households headed by a parent who did not finish high school are not using the banking system at all. As well in part of the statistics we see that one of every five African Americans or Hispanic Americans do not have a bank account as well.
This is quite startling in the fact that mostly all banks will allow you to open a free checking account with only a minimum of a few dollars, yet people are still unable to have enough savings to do so. Even if you are in this country illegally you can stash your money in our banking system thanks to Bank of America and their don’t ask don’t tell policy with account holders. I mean it is even so bad that I have heard through a friend that Bank of America employees are often sent out to seek potential customers and plead with them to open new accounts to boost their “new checking accounts” record, and make the branch they work for look better.
As well these Bank of America branch employees seeking new customers often end up in the parking lot of Home Depot or Lowes pleading with the work for hire gentleman to open accounts. Yet none of these tactics seem to work, or make any mark on the number of people that lack a bank account. If you ask me the problem starts in our education system, and if we as a country were able to spend more time with our kids and better educate them we could close the gap on the high school dropouts and induce more kids to attend college and seek rewarding careers.
We then would have higher wage earners that have discretionary income that they could put away in the bank in either a savings or checking account. But its not all the fault of the school system as it is the parents responsibility to make sure their children are learning and growing and becoming responsible teenagers and adults, and the learning needs to continue at home after school. Lastly I believe that we as a country and culture need to spend more time focusing on education, government and holding ourselves accountable, and less time worrying about what celebrities ate for dinner or who they slept with. We have become a culture of instant gratification and a culture of entertainment and have forgotten that education and graciousness and self accountability is what has gotten us to this point.
So if some things start to evolve and change it will help the system and culture to evolve, and thus better educate the masses to be more intelligent in life and decisions. Thus closing the gap on poverty and getting everyone their own bank account. But we do see that the majority (94% of Americans) do have bank accounts, and that maybe the 5%-6% is just the standard deviation of the population. But there is always room to improve, both on better educating our youth and the push for more households to save money and open bank accounts. But I can see where maybe over the last year or two banks could have lost a lot of customers. I mean with the mishandling of funds and rates for money market accounts and savings accounts earning pretty much no interest.
We see the bad judgment and misuse of government tarp funds and banks going under because of poor investment decisions at the top. I could see how people would be a bit skeptical about allowing the bank to manage their funds. But overall having money in a bank account is good for both you the account holder and the banks and banking system, because it allows for banks to buildup capital and loan out more money and extend the financial arm that will help to get our banking system back on track and the economy trudging along at a more rapid rate.As well with this we see a rise in interest rates for you the account holder. So be smart with your money and save as much as you can, living off of credit is not smart practice.