i love these stories.
people insulting the banks, but the crucial thing these story tellers keep forgetting...
if they truly didnt need banks and truly felt banks disapearing would be great..................... why do these story tellers even have bank accounts in the first place to complain about.
the moral of the story is that until you are not reliant on a bank and open up your mind to other methods.. banks will survive.
Not all of us are in that group.
Continual dissatisfaction caused me to move my accounts to smaller and smaller banks over the course of several years, until finally I walked away entirely and never looked back; I've been bank-free for at least 5 years now. Ironically, with the various laws and controls around banking that have cropped up, I doubt I could get another bank account now if I wanted to. Fortunately, I don't want to.
So yes, living without a bank account--provided a few crucial services, like a mortgage in your own name, aren't needed--is possible. If you work off the books, or have a small business with an alternate money management setup, or get a paycheck from a company with an account at a local bank, it doesn't even have to be difficult.
Is it more costly? Yes and no. I don't have easy access to some of the money-saving features I used to (direct deposit, complimentary debit card, a "safe place" for my money, etc.) but at the same time I don't pay a lot of the costs I used to either (various bank fees, errors and bad bank policies that cost me money; loss of privacy; having accounts frozen or not having access to funds/services as needed, etc.) Plus, the experience paved the way for me to be pretty open to the idea of being my own bank with bitcoin.
I guess the question is, do we really want financial freedom or not?
My take on this is that the war on cash in many 1st world countries is having a particularly detrimental effect on the poor and lower middle class. A very simple example is payroll. 50 years ago many employers would pay their employees in cash. The cost of handling the cash was the responsibility of the employer. Today many of the same employers will pay by cheque or even worse a prepaid debit card. The cost of handling cash is now passed on to the employee either in the form of a fee to cash the cheque at a cheque cashing store or fees on the debit card.
Yup. I've witnessed this before myself (I *think* it might still go on in some businesses in the U.S.) If businesses can pay you in cash perfectly legally, even if they simply stamp and cash out your paycheck themselves at the office, why don't they? Because they don't have to, because it saves them money (at your expense,) and because the entire system is encouraging it... and now everyone else is adopting the "anti-cash" perspective too. Telling your employees they have to get paid via a prepaid debit card is pretty much financial coercion; I've seen the fees and restrictions, and they're deplorable.
Every time I hear an American speak up against terrorism it's like hearing a Nazi SS commander speaking against the imaginary leftist communist jews trying to take up the world...
Take it from an American, to many of us it sounds that way too. And their obliviousness to how they sound is the most frustrating part.
