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Re:The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts by woofyman on Saturday September 21, 2013 @11:22AM (#6423211)
USA banks are federally insured, so there's no risk in losing your money.

Running away from creditors is not a valid reason. They can sue you. They can't directly take your money.

Re:The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts by cdh on Saturday September 21, 2013 @11:35AM (#6423244)
Well, that's not quite true. There is always a small risk of losing some (or even all) of your money, particularly if you have a large amount in your account. Obviously that risk is very, very low for smaller amounts of money.
Re:The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts by bhickey on Saturday September 21, 2013 @02:44PM (#6423964)
There are risks we should be concerned about, and risks we should not be concerned about. If you stuff money under your matress, the risk of losing it to a house fire or robbery are several orders of magnitude greater than losing it in a bank run.

Assuming your account is under the FDIC limit, how could you lose money on an insured account? Suppose there's a massive bank run and the Fed has to print oodles of cash to repay depositors. This leads to runaway inflation that occurs over a very short period. If you could have otherwise exchanged your cash on hand for a different currency, sure you would have lost money.

Compared with the actual risks of being unbanked, this is a hallucinatory concern.

Re:The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts by woofyman on Saturday September 21, 2013 @11:42AM (#6423268)
250k is the insured limit. You can open accounts in multiple banks if you have more cash than that.