So with the new regime executive order declaring it essentially illegal to be unhoused, people at risk might be thinking, “how do they classify me as homeless if I am surfing between friends or family or shelters?”
One of the big answers to this is the practice of debanking. If your financial institutions catch wind that you don’t have a stable address, they will try to close your accounts and send your balance as a cashier’s check to your last legal address. At-risk people understand the many, many scenarios where even just this process could be devastating.
Some unexpected ways you can get de-banked:
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your apartment doesn’t have a legal address
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you lose home owner’s insurance or your coverage changes and your bank decides it doesn’t like that
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your building’s owner defaults
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fire
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flood
You may be at risk and just now realizing it. If you have an MH diagnosis and you don’t have two back-up legal addresses, you are on this Ex O.
Anyway, do not get debanked. Have legal address back-up plans EVEN IF YOU TRY TO FLEE THE COUNTRY because you do not want the regime classifying you as someone they want to put in the camps.
Sorry for another US-centric post.
I came into this thread thinking that the term de-banking was something like de-google and I was eager to find some opensource service tô get rid of the dependency of banks all together.
Boy was I wrong. /s
Good advice though!
I was eager to find some opensource service tô get rid of the dependency of banks all together.
Credit unions
Indeed, part of protecting yourself is diversifying where you keep your money (even if you don’t have a lot), and part of that answer is credit unions. Don’t just assume in institution is okay just because they are a CU though, plenty of scum CUs.
Holy shit.
To think I was envious of America when I was young.
To be honest, this shift in our politics has been brutally quick and more federally far reaching than anything that happened while I was growing up. People used to be able to just exist. Camp in parks, sleep on benches, etc. This authoritarianism is… Somewhat new.
It’s only been quick if you just started paying attention. This is the end result of decades of work by the GOP.
Not really. People are just less ashamed than they used to be.
It started in earnest under Regan. It’s just been difficult to see where all those changes would lead until all at once it smacked us in the face.
It was slow and incremental. You can’t boil a frog by tossing it in a fryer.
True. That would result in frying it.
For all other Europeans out there, avoiding this situation is another thing the EU did for us.
For the Americans, write to your representatives demanding the same rights.
Excluding people from having a bank account in 2025 is basically condemning them to ostracism even without sending them to concentration camps.
I’ve long held the belief that the US postal service should also provide basic banking services too in the US, that way no one can be denied a bank account.
One of the things Bernie Sanders ran on. He wanted to do that and ton more good things for us little people. But the Democrats rather have fascism under Trump then progressive policies.
Did you independently reinvent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_System or did you know about the history?
I didn’t know that existed!
Its decline reads like everything else going on in the US. Government provided a service a lot of people liked, private enterprise lobbies to have it shut down and lock people into nickel and diming them.